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World Baseball Classic
The first World Baseball Classic championship game wasn’t a classic, but it did produce a worthy champion. Japan made three errors, but they also forced Cuba to use eight pitchers on their way to a 10-6 win. They put together two four-run innings, the first and the last, and they consistently came up with something we had seen little of in the first 38 games of the tournament: clutch hits, with runners in scoring position.

Cuba was an unknown factor at the beginning of the tournament, but we now know they are a gritty bunch of players who keep coming back. Today they were down 4-0 before they even came to bat, and down 6-1 for the first half of the game, but by the ninth they had battled back to within a run.

Japan, on the other hand, was one of the favorites, and they showed they were deserving of that honor, both in the final game tonight and in the semifinal Saturday against Korea. The fact that the U.S. team was shut out of the final game, in which only two major leaguers played, shows that baseball is a game played at a high level around the world.

Now let’s get it back in the Olympics!

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