For my money, the best part of any World Baseball Classic is not the back end of the tourney, when the field has been whittled to the world's best and the level of play is immaculate. Sure, there's some good baseball there, and high drama, and it's where bragging rights truly get parceled out as the sport's superpowers face each other: your Japans, your DRs, your USAs. No, pool play is where the most fun is to be found. Think of it like the opening weekend of March Madness, where the draw is not necessarily greatness, but joy: teams who have little business holding their own against the titans and doing it anyway; getting to learn about the quirks and traditions of those more obscure teams; heavy-traveling fans who make a neutral site feel like a home game; feeling, secondhand but unmistakable, the pride players take in wearing their colors.
With so much baseball going on at the same time, it all just kind of washes over you in a pleasant cultural stew. There's the Emperor of Japan attending an international baseball game for the first time in nearly 60 years. There's the Italians drinking espresso in the dugout. There's Luis Arraez inexplicably turning into Barry Bonds, but once again only for a WBC. There is cool and/or weird shit going on at basically any moment; it is, like baseball itself, best consumed in bulk.
And yet, in the five previous editions of the Classic, one not-uncommon thing had somehow never happened even once: a walk-off home run, that purest of baseball joys. On Saturday we got two, and if you're still a little cynical about this tournament or feel like it's not taken as seriously as it could be, this is the stuff you'd want to distill and bottle.
In Miami, with a very unMiamilike raucousness to the crowd, Team Netherlands found itself struggling again Nicaragua, one of this tournament's minnows who have never won a WBC game before. Jaitoine Kelly, a Diamondbacks prospect who at 18 years old was the youngest starter in WBC history, traded solid innings with veteran free agent Erasmo Ramirez. When Jeter Downs broke a tie in the eighth with a home run to make it 3-1 Nicaragua, and the Dutch made the first two outs in the ninth, it looked like they'd need a honkbal miracle.
After Ceddanne Rafaela singled, Xander Bogaerts hit what looked like it might be a game-ending grounder to third. But the ball struck third base and bounced into left field for a double, bringing up Ozzie Albies as the winning run against Angel Obando. Albies, who said afterward he expected to be walked intentionally, revealed, "I said if he brings his best pitch, the fastball, I've got to put my best swing on it.” Obanda threw a first-pitch fastball.
It was a heartbreaker for Nicaragua, which boasts only a handful of players in MLB organizations. But to reach for that March Madness comparison again, sometimes the best games are upsets that don't quite happen.
Incredibly, just a few hours after the first walk-off dinger in tourney history, it happened again. Puerto Rico needed some small ball to even tie the game against upstart Panama in the ninth—walk, single, walk, walk—and again in the 10th—GIDP fielder's choice. That cleared the bases and set the stage for light-hitting A's prospect Darell Hernaiz.
"I’m not a guy to take it out of the park," said Hernaiz, who took it out of the park and sent the San Juan crowd into a delirium.
"I blacked out," Hernaiz admitted. "I don't remember anything."
I think Kathryn nailed it earlier this week when she wrote that it's not that people care about this tournament because it matters, but the other way around: It matters if people care about it. Just watch that celebration and listen to that crowd; I'd say the early returns are in.
