Team USA had an uninspiring showing during pool play at this year's World Baseball Classic, and thanks to manager Mark DeRosa's struggles with math, needed a little bit of luck to make it to the quarterfinals. But now, after victories over Canada and the Dominican Republic, the Americans are headed to the final. Perhaps they have former SEAL Team Six member Robert O'Neill to thank for their good run of form.
O'Neill visited the players in the locker room at some point before Friday's 5-3 victory over Canada. A snippet of O'Neill's pep talk, which featured him detailing the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden with all the panache of a coworker recapping his weekend, was posted online before Friday's game. O'Neill, who claims to have shot and killed bin Laden, was an odd choice for locker-room motivator given what he's been up to since leaving the armed forces more than a decade ago. O'Neill is part of a cohort of former special forces operators who spend all of their time writing books and making podcast appearances in which they accuse each other of lying about their service records. He is also the guy who tweeted "You’re not men. You’re boys. If there was no social media, you would be my concubines," at a group of young male Kamala Harris voters in 2024. He has been banned from Delta Airlines and arrested for DUI, public intoxication, and misdemeanor assault. His tweets remain awful.
Team USA applied O'Neill's lessons in a two-run victory over Canada on Friday, and then emerged from Sunday's tense, highly competitive game against the Dominican Republic with a 2-1 win. Paul Skenes started for the Americans, working around a Junior Caminero solo shot in the second inning to hold the Dominicans' stacked lineup to just six hits and one run in 4.1 innings. Team USA struck back in the fourth inning with solo homers from Gunnar Henderson and Roman Anthony, and then it was time for a procession of meaty boys to emerge from the bullpen and protect Team USA's lead.
Tyler Rogers, Griffin Jax, David Bednar, Garrett Whitlock, and Mason Miller all submitted scoreless outings. The Dominicans had a good chance to score against Bednar in the seventh, but squandered two runners in scoring position with back-to-back strikeouts. They had a runner on third base in the ninth inning, too, but Miller managed to end the game with a called third strike on a slider that was wayyyyy below the strike zone. No matter: Team USA will get ready to face the winner of Venezuela-Italy in the final on Tuesday, and the Dominicans will spend a few hours being annoyed at bad umpiring before returning to their real jobs.
It's easy to assume that O'Neill's talk had little to do with helping the Americans pull off consecutive steely-eyed victories, but if there is any team that was constructed to be inspired by a guy like O'Neill, it's this one. Setting aside the fact that it's almost a guarantee that Bryce Harper and O'Neill have similar tastes in raw milk, there's the fact the Americans' team spirit seems to have been possessed by that of a grim-faced operator. Their march to the final started with team captain Aaron Judge awkwardly urging his teammates to remember that they are "sacrificing for your family at home, sacrificing for your country, and sacrificing for your brothers in the trenches." The team's first headline of the tournament came from Cal Raleigh allowing his red-assedness to prevent him from shaking Mariners teammate Randy Arozarena's hand. Raleigh also wore a "Front Toward Enemy" t-shirt, which is made by O'Neill's busted apparel brand, while addressing his odd behavior towards Arozarena. When asked before Sunday's game why O'Neill was brought in to talk to the team, DeRosa had this to say:
You never want it to get lost why you're doing this, whatever that why is. Paul Skenes said to me when he signed up for this, "I want to do this for every service man and woman that protects our freedom." That's why we wear USA across our chest. I just thought it would be a time to kind of redirect and get those guys to understand that although this is an unbelievable event, and you get a chance to share a locker room with the game's greats, there's a reason why you're doing it, and a reason why people protect our freedom at night, and I just wanted to honor that.
Baseball doesn't have to be like this. Every pitch you throw does not need to be thrown in honor of servicemen and women. You can do other stuff instead, like have fun and dance and drink espresso in the dugout after hitting a home run.
