Welcome to Snyder’s Soapbox! Here, I pontificate about matters related to Major League Baseball on a weekly basis. Some of the topics will be pressing matters, some might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this website is that it’s free, and you are allowed to click away. If you stay, you’ll get smarter, though. That’s a money-back guarantee. Let’s get to it.
MIAMI — For those who unfortunately missed it, USA topped the Dominican Republic in the World Baseball Classic semifinals Sunday night, 2-1. It was the most action-packed game you’ll ever see with only three runs scored. I understand that afterward, there are going to be emotions and maybe people will say things they maybe shouldn’t, but good grief, man …
“We showed the world who’s the best team in baseball,” Dominican Republic superstar Juan Soto told ESPN. “That’s all I got to say.”
It reminds me of USA winning the gold medal in hockey just a few weeks ago and there was similar sentiment floating around from the Canadian locker room. They dominated the game! And they lost.Â
Do I really need to channel my inner Herm Edwards here?Â
Hello!? You play to win the game!Â
I really hope this isn’t going to be a trend. A team loses and someone in the locker room declares that they were still better? You don’t get to do that.Â
Juan Soto says the Dominican Republic is still the ‘best team in baseball’ despite WBC loss vs. Team USA
Dayn Perry
This isn’t a subjective debate. There aren’t judges who get to decide which team looked better. We are keeping score here. There’s a scoreboard. It says you lost. Anything that could be said back in any argument can be met with a simple statement of fact. Watch.Â
The Dominican Republic had more hits than USA.Â
USA won.
Dominican pitchers struck out 15 batters compared to only eight strikeouts for USA pitchers.Â
USA won.
The DR had more rallies and threatened to score more often than USA.Â
USA won.
DR felt like the better team.
USA won.
I don’t understand this. How can you claim to love a sport if you also don’t think the final score is ultimately the thing that matters most? The whole point of playing a game and keeping score is to decide which team wins. USA scored two runs. The Dominican Republic scored one.Â
Am I being a so-called “ugly American” and gloating? Absolutely not. If USA lost and someone from the team said the same thing, we’d be right here having this exact same discussion. It isn’t about which team won or lost. My issue is this sentiment that a losing team gets to just declare that it was better. What kind of nonsense is that?Â
It’s also bizarre to me that it’s Soto who made the statement. Arguably the biggest moment of the game came in the fifth inning when the Dominican Republic had runners on first and second with one out. USA reliever Tyler Rogers came into the game. Soto was batting. And he hit into a double play to end the inning with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. on deck.Â
If you’re truly the best team in the world, maybe don’t hit into an inning-ending double play there? Or maybe score more than one run in the entire game? It’s exactly the same thing I thought about the hockey argument. If Canada was so much better and more dominant, maybe it should’ve scored more than one goal? That is, after all, the entire point of the game. You’re trying to score goals, not simply dominate one side of the ice.Â
Over in the World Baseball Classic, we measure the winners by who scores the most runs. The Dominican Republic was a totally dominant force for its first five games of the WBC. The team was averaging more than 10 runs per game. And then in the semifinals against USA, it scored one run and left a small village on the bases. If Soto’s quote was really true, in that the D.R. showed the world it was the best team, several more of those runners would have come home to score and we’d be watching the Dominican Republic in the finals Tuesday.Â
Instead, USA won. The losing team needs to accept it lost in sports. This is one area of society where there is no discussion. It’s cut and dry. The scoreboard tells us that there was, in fact, a winner and a loser.
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