US vs. Japan

[Buehrle>Wood]

Line-up for the U.S.:

 

1. Micheal Young, 2B

2. Derek Jeter, SS

3. Ken Griffey, CF

4. Alex Rodriguez, DH

5. Chipper Jones, 3B

6. Derek Lee, 1B

7. Brian Schneider, C

8. Vernon Wells, RF

9. Randy Winn, LF

 

Jake Peavy is on the mound.

[Gregory Pratt]

3-1 Japan.

 

Chipper Jones hit a homer to put one on the board for America. I love Chipper Jones.

[whitesoxfan101]

U.S. has blown several great scoring chances, especially early. If they don't come back and win, there's your reason why.

[DonkeyKongerko]

Why do we continue to bat ARod cleanup? So we can give away more outs before Lee crushes another one?

[Gregory Pratt]

It's about time the United States ties the game.

[DonkeyKongerko]

Japan just got f***ed over on an overturned sacrifice fly. Doug Eddings has been sighted in the tunnel.

[Gregory Pratt]

I'm so tired of Johnny Damon and Alex Rodriguez sucking ass in this tournament. If it weren't for Derrek Lee and Chipper Jones, Team America would have been absolutely useless this whole tournament when it's counted.

[Flash Tizzle]

Japan just got f***ed over on an overturned sacrifice fly. Doug Eddings has been sighted in the tunnel.

What's funny is once again Bud Selig will get s*** because of this.

 

"It's his fault for hiring minor league umpires," is probably what we'll hear.

[Brian]

Thought for sure Lidge was gonna lose it and keep his suck ass streak alive.

[sayitaintso]

Thought for sure Lidge was gonna lose it and keep his suck ass streak alive.

That ended in October.

[Brian]

Bags loaded, 1 out, bottom of 9, Griffey up, tie game. Thank God it isn't ARod.

[DonkeyKongerko]

Bags loaded, 1 out, bottom of 9, Griffey up, tie game. Thank God it isn't ARod.

 

Be careful what you wish for Brian. Did anyone not see that high fastball coming to Griffey there?

[Brian]

JR K's, AROD up with a chance to win it.

[Buehrle>Wood]

Jesus Christ Griffey. Should have been game.

[Buehrle>Wood]

A-ROD!!!

[Brian]

Holy cow, ARod comes through. USA beats Japan, 4-3

[DonkeyKongerko]

Well ARod gets his clutch hit for the year. Welcome to the postgame controversy.

[Gregory Pratt]

Be careful what you wish for Brian. Did anyone not see that high fastball coming to Griffey there?

 

Griffey's such a stupid bastard. He swung at two awful pitches and the last one would've walked in the winning run. I guess he just wanted to show off for his son and the Reds.

 

And Brad Lidge nearly kept his choke streak going. Glad he didn't.

 

But A-Rod just hit a single, and finally made good. America wins!

[Buehrle>Wood]

What an awesome game.

[iWiN4PreP]

great game

[DBAHO]

Ken Rosenthal had this to say;

 

ANAHEIM, Calif. - Well, you just knew the East German judge would come into play.

 

Oh, the World Baseball Classic isn't to be confused with the Olympics, but as an international competition, it offers the same potential for officiating bias.

If the WBC grows into a major event — and from early indications, it just might — umpiring crews will need to reflect a mix of neutral countries.

 

A full-blown, Olympic-style controversy will be inevitable if the umpires remain mostly American, and such a dispute would dwarf the one that occurred Sunday in a second-round game between the United States and Japan.

 

"It's just unimaginable that this could have happened, or this did happen, in the U.S., where baseball is very famous and popular," Japanese manager Sadaharu Oh said after his team's 4-3 defeat.

 

Evidently, Oh did not witness the 2005 major-league postseason, when major-league umpires proved repeatedly that they were fully capable of blowing calls.

 

But that's not the point.

 

The WBC format already is rigged so the U.S. can get to the final round without facing the top Latin American powers — the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Venezuela and Puerto Rico.

 

It shouldn't be packed with U.S. umpires, too.

 

Oh did not utter the phrase "home cooking" in Japanese, and plate umpire Bob Davidson's disputed call on a tag-up play with the score tied in the eighth inning reflected, at worst, poor judgment.

 

Still, 22 of the 32 umpires in the initial WBC are American, including three of the four who worked the U.S.-Japan game; Neil Poulton, Sunday's third-base ump, is from Australia.

 

What's worse is that the Americans aren't even the best American umpires; WBC organizers hired minor-league umps after their major-league counterparts overreached in negotiations to work the event.

 

Davidson, an 18-year major-league veteran, is actually an exception — he worked part-time in the majors last season and is waiting to return full-time as part of a settlement of a dispute that cost 22 umpires their jobs in 1999.

 

Full-time major-league umps are not perfect, but if they botch a call in the playoffs, they're merely accused of incompetence, not favoritism. If the WBC continues using mostly American umps, the potential will exist for such a situation to turn ugly.

 

TV replays indicated that Davidson erred by ruling that Tsuyoshi Nishioka left third base early, overruling a call by second-base ump Brian Knight, who had shifted to third as third-base ump Poulton monitored Akinori Iwamura's flyball to short left field.

 

Instead of producing the go-ahead run, the sequence resulted in an inning-ending double play. Oh, assisted by an interpreter, entered into a prolonged argument with Davidson. But the score remained tied, and the U.S. won on Alex Rodriguez's two-out, broken-bat, bases-loaded single in the ninth.

 

U.S. catcher Brian Schneider said he thought Nishioka left third too early, and when he glanced to the U.S. dugout for confirmation, he saw the bench going "nuts."

 

U.S. third baseman Chipper Jones said, "Everyone was like, 'Throw it to third! Throw it to third!"

 

Second baseman Michael Young looked up immediately after the ball was caught and said Nishioka already was five steps down the line.

 

"I know the guy runs well," Young said, "but if he's that fast, he's playing the wrong sport. He should be running in the Olympics."

 

Still, the play was far closer than Young believed. A U.S. player who saw the replay said flatly, "He did not leave early."

 

Major leaguers rarely are called out on such plays unless the infraction is blatant. It's even rarer for an umpire to rule that a runner tagged properly, then see his call overturned.

 

"It's a tag-up situation with the bases loaded," Davidson told a pool reporter. "Our mechanic is that it's the plate umpire who lines up the tag.

 

"Brian Knight hustled over to third, where he's supposed to be, but he doesn't have the tag. That's the plate umpire's call. I had it lined up. The wrong umpire made the initial call. The plate umpire, which is me, it's my call, and I had him leaving early."

 

Fair enough, but the U.S. players recognized that the call, at the very least, was unusual.

 

"Let's just say I'm glad Lou Piniella wasn't their manager," Jones said. "I believe he might have lost his cap after that one."

 

Derek Jeter agreed, smiling.

 

"He would have gotten tossed on that one," Jeter said of Piniella, the former Devil Rays' manager. "A lot of people would have gotten tossed on that one. The interpreter, I think, settled things down. You can't really argue. You can argue, but you've got to wait a minute (for the translation)."

 

The Japanese, needless to say, weren't as amused.

 

"Nobody can accept this loss," Koji Uehara, Japan's starting pitcher, told Japanese reporters. "I am a bit ticked off."

 

WBC organizers, be forewarned: The bigger the tournament gets, the greater the need for diversity in umpiring crews, or the more vehement the reactions will be.