Team USA avoided a World Baseball Classic disaster on Wednesday when Italy pulverized Mexico, ensuring the Americans advanced to the quarterfinals.
The drama following Team USA’s loss to Italy, and the deluge of questions that followed, revealed a couple things that we know for sure:
First: There is not just one reason that Team USA lost its final game of pool play against Team Italy, missing a chance to lock in a spot in the quarterfinals and putting the Americans on the brink of their earliest World Baseball Classic ouster.
Even the b-squad was stacked with big leaguers who performed admirably and conceivably could have trounced the opposition on a different night. The result of any one baseball game can be traced back to pitching changes or lineup decisions – but it can also be chalked up to an extra inch of break on a pitch or a millisecond of hesitation on a swing. What we saw on the field Tuesday night was an Italian team out-mashing the presumed Goliaths of the 2026 WBC.
But also: I do not believe that Team USA manager Mark DeRosa misspoke. I think he did not realize that his team had not, in fact, punched a ticket to the quarterfinals. At least not when he said as much on MLB Network the morning of the fateful loss.
That was his explanation after the fact – “I just misspoke,” he told the media postgame, once his offhanded comment looked like evidence of potentially tournament-ending mismanagement. But you can’t spoonerism your way into saying, “We want to win this game, even though our ticket’s punched to the quarterfinals.” One does not stumble over their words and wind up accidentally announcing plans to rest your regulars, a strategy that only makes sense if you don’t think the game is all that important.
Just a few hours before his lineup looked listless and his management betrayed a lack of urgency, DeRosa also fondly regaled the media with an account of how late his team stayed in the clubhouse drinking and celebrating their win the night before.
“There’s some guys dragging today,” he said – a stunning admission if he knew then that a win was necessary to guarantee his guys would advance. Unless he simply didn’t respect the opposition.
As it turns out, they advanced anyway. The loss on Tuesday set up a situation where Team USA did not control its own fate, but instead was at the mercy of the matchup between Italy and Mexico. The Americans were left to root for the same team that embarrassed them, and that team delivered.
If you watched Italy beat the US utterly ignorant of the expectations and individual track records, you could come away thinking that the Italian squad – which is, I’m sorry to tell you, overwhelmingly American-born professional baseball players and not a bunch of preternaturally athletic pizzaiolos – was the heavy favorite in the tournament. Michael Lorenzen – a journeyman two-way-player-turned-reliever-turned-starter – shut down a US lineup with a combined 24 All-Star appearances. The Italian lineup scored eight runs, including three homers, off all Major-League pitching.
One night later, Italy trounced Mexico, the second favorite in the pool, even more emphatically, flashing more power and sneaky defensive dekes in the win. Vinnie Pasquantino, an Extremely Online vibes guy who also plays for the Kansas City Royals, became the first player to homer three times in a WBC game and drank an espresso shot after each of them, as is the custom in the Italy dugout.
Team USA advances, but only Team Italy – this year’s Cinderella’s of the WBC – emerges from Pool B undefeated. It is the first European nation to win its first four games of the World Baseball Classic. Those players should be proud of the way they rose to the occasion, elevating the entertainment value and the competition level of the WBC.
Team USA, or at least its manager, cannot say the same.
Don’t let the fact that Italy’s unexpected heroics allowed Team USA to back into a quarterfinal spot erase the embarrassment of an all-too-telling admission of ignorance by DeRosa.
Much has been made this year about how American players are, finally, taking the WBC seriously. (Some might say the players taking it too seriously compared to the on-field theatrics of their international brethren.) The country that lays colloquial claim to the pastime has historically underperformed, quite clearly because other nations were simply trying harder in the form of better players agreeing to participate.
It’s translating to ratings; people tune in to see stars. But baseball is a cerebral sport, often determined by decisions made away from the field. To say as much about MLB would be to state the obvious – superior analytics and savvy executives underpin the most successful organizations. You can’t win without crunching the numbers.
Like, for instance, can your opposition also finish 3-1 if they still have one more game to play.
A serious baseball team is more than just Aaron Judge as captain and Tarik Skubal on the mound for a couple innings. It’s elite coaching staff and diligent preparation. A television host with no coaching experience outside previous WBCs, DeRosa is a fine manager if this is all just an exhibition.
But if you want fans to tune in like it’s a meaningful measure of baseball’s global hierarchy, then I’m not sure he gets the job. Not after this performance anyway.
But DeRosa is just the most visible culprit. Where was Michael Hill, the commissioner’s office executive serving as Team USA’s general manager, while his manager was mangling the stakes of the situation? Or, perhaps more pressingly, in the wake of that misunderstanding being made public? What kind of staff has been assembled to ensure the actors closest to the field of action have accurate information?
And on the subject of taking this whole operation seriously: What sort of limitations on player usage is DeRosa operating with when it comes to satisfying the demands of a player’s MLB organization? The comments concerned me more than the actual in-game management, which we have to concede is complicated by the need to balance conflicting priorities.
I wouldn’t be asking these questions if, instead of a nonsensical lie about misspeaking, DeRosa had simply said, When I did that interview, I didn’t understand the situation and I said something wrong. But there are other people involved in our strategizing. Don’t worry, we got it sorted before the game. And if it seemed like that was true.
Instead, DeRosa has been doubling down. On Thursday he reiterated that his error was one of oration – remember, he’s a professional television speaker – not of understanding. He claims that his premature comment about securing a spot in the quarterfinals was “just an overly confident statement.”
Indeed. That is the other possible explanation: He simply expected an American squad operating on an admitted lack of sleep to cakewalk to victory over the Italians. Now that we’ve seen how the game actually played out, is that any better?
As it stands, the news cycle has nearly run its course and the Americans might still win it all. Talent triumphing over tactics, at least on the diamond.
But it’s worth noting that, despite how exciting the players on Team USA undoubtedly are, it seemed that a certain segment of the baseball viewing population turned against them, rooting for the final game of Pool B to result in their elimination as comeuppance for their leader’s hubris.
I hope that impulse can be overcome. There’s good stuff here, still. It would be a shame to miss it.
-CNN
