The World Baseball Classic Was a Far East Affair

If you watched the World Baseball Classic or searched the web for sports news stories on the subject, you will already be aware of the final being played between Japan and Korea.

That’s right folks, a complete far east final. Both of these teams deserved to be there too. They were the class of the tournament  and finished play before the final with identical 6-2 records. Loosing only to each other.

Korea got to the final by crushing Venezuela 10-2 while Japan had a neat and tidy spanking of the USA by a convincing score of 9-4 in their semifinal. The US made three errors in the game which accounted for five unearned runs.

Both Japan and Korea got to the final by playing exceptional defence, with great pitching and textbook execution.

The three main ingredients for winning baseball. These two teams may have had a bit of an advantage as they had been playing together since Feb. 1, long before the other teams were assembled.

The point is moot because they were both deserving and were far and away the two best teams. The teams weren’t here by accident or fluke. Japan is the defending World Baseball Classic champion and Korea is the current Olympic gold medalist from the Bejing games.

In the final, the Korean team dodged bullets all night, Japan threatened to blow the game open on a few occasions. Every time though it just seemed that when Korea needed a big play on defence, they got it to wiggle off the hook and keep the game close.

Japan went ahead 3-2 in the top of the ninth, but Korea came back and tied it up in their half of the inning. So going into the 10th inning, the score was 3-3. Japan had left on 11 base runners, while Korea had been pretty efficient, cashing in almost every base runner they had.

In the top of the 10th Suzuki Ichiro came to the plate with two runners on and two outs. With first base open Allsports thought for sure the Korean manager would intentionally walk him to load the bases and take his chances with the next batter.

Much to my suprise, he pitched to Ichiro, and he made them pay, driving in both runners with a single up the gut of the infield. They turned out to be the winning runs as YU Darvish came back out for the bottom of the 10th and retired the Korean batters.

Dice “K” won the MVP for the tournament, going 3-0 with a 2.45 ERA but Allsports says move over Dice “K” cause this Darvish kid is the real deal. He has a fastball clocked in the 96-100 mph range along with a knee buckling change up and great curveball.

The kicker is, he is only 22 years old. How many MLB scouts were drooling over this kid. The answer, all of them.

Here are some Highlights from the Game

“No Guts No Glory”

Walt Webb

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