HOUSTON – The United States stole hockey from Canada at the Olympics and try as they did, the Canadians couldn’t steal baseball in return from the Americans at the World Baseball Classic.
An inspired run to the quarterfinals, a first for the national team in six trips to the event, ended Friday night with a 5-3 loss in which there was both plenty to be proud of for the national team, along with plenty to lament.
Michael Soroka got bled for three runs, two of them scoring in the third when Abraham Toro airmailed a relay to first on an Alex Bregman infield single that could have been the inning’s final out, while consecutive RBI singles in the sixth by Brice Turang and Pete Crow-Armstrong opened things up.
Logan Webb, meanwhile, threw 4.2 shutout innings and the Canadian offence didn’t get on track until the sixth, when Tyler Black ripped an RBI single off Brad Keller before Bo Naylor crushed a two-run shot 404 feet to right field to cut the U.S. lead to 5-3.
A turning point came in the seventh when Edouard Julien and Otto Lopez opened the inning with singles and advanced on a Cal Raleigh passed ball, but David Bednar got Josh Naylor to pop up on a middle-middle 96.8 m.p.h heater to third. Tyler O’Neill then struck out on a chase curveball while Owen Caissie lost a tenacious nine-pitch duel by swinging through a split.
That proved costly as Garrett Whitlock worked a clean eighth before Mason Miller closed things out in the ninth as crowd of 38,054 celebrated.
The Americans, who only advanced out of pool play with the help of the Italian team that beat them, advanced to the Sunday semifinal in Miami, where they’ll meet Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and the Dominican Republic, who mercy-ruled South Korea 10-0 in Friday’s other quarterfinal. Puerto Rico meets Italy while Venezuela takes on Japan on Saturday to decide the other side of the bracket.
The Canadians, meanwhile, will part ways having finally raised the bar for themselves at the Classic, while also knowing there was an opportunity to go even further, too.
To be fair, they showed well even in a tournament structure designed to feature the American team, a reality underlined by the way this quarterfinal, originally scheduled for Saturday, was moved to Friday so the U.S. remained in the broadcast slot envisioned for them.
Playing a day earlier had little impact on them, but gave the Canadians less time to recover from their 7-2 win over Cuba on Wednesday and the subsequent flight from San Juan to Houston.
Combine that with the restrictions on player usage the Canadians had to face — a reality for all Classic teams but more damaging to countries with shallower talent pools — and there were limits on how creative they could get, even as they got deeper into the event.
“Nothing has changed with any of our pitchers because we've gone on, other than MLB's restrictions,” said manager Ernie Whitt. “But they don't even come close to what our restrictions are. But I'm sure we're not the only team. I'm sure the other teams have restrictions also. We just play by what we have with the players we have and what the organization tells us they want.”
Once you consider some of the prominent names that, for different reasons, didn’t pitch — Nick Pivetta, Cade Smith, Matt Brash, Jordan Romano, Jonah Tong — and it’s clear the Canadians did a good job of piecing a plan together.
The hope is that the next time there’s a World Baseball Classic, in 2029 or 2030 depending on what happens with the next collective bargaining agreement, even more of the country’s best players join the current core.
“The players that are playing in it this year, I think it's a very positive message that they'll take back to their peers,” said Whitt. “I don't see any reason why, unless there are injuries involved, that they wouldn't want to participate in the next one. And that's what we're hoping for. We're hoping to get the best players available. Again, they've got that decision and that's what they have to live with and I respect it. The one thing that I've always asked, if you have any doubt in your mind, I don't want you. That's the bottom line. If you're going to make a commitment to come and play, I want 100 per cent in.”
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