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Team USA may have the deepest lineup they have ever assembled for the World Baseball Classic. They may have three MVPs at the top of their batting order. They may have so much star power they carry $2 billion worth of active contracts. But there is something they don’t have.
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They don’t have the best starting pitchers America has to offer. Not close. That was painfully obvious Sunday night in what was the worst night of first-round play for Team USA in the history of the WBC. Mexico pummeled the U.S., 11–5, while putting 20 runners on, including 15 by hits.
Just like that, all that likely stands between the U.S. and an embarrassing and shocking first-round elimination Monday is a teenage Bratt—Mitch Bratt, a 19-year-old lefthander who starts for Canada against Lance Lynn for the U.S. Bratt pitched last season, one year out of high school, for the Class A Down East Ducks. If Team USA loses to Canada, it will need some kind of tie in the standings that involves Colombia to advance. It’s convoluted, but rest assured it’s a virtual must-win game Monday for the U.S.
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Nineteen starting pitchers received Cy Young Award votes last season. Fifteen of them were born in the U.S. None of them pitch for Team USA. (Yankees lefthander Nestor Cortes did sign up for duty but backed out because of injury.)
Four do gladly pitch for other countries in the WBC: Sandy Alcantara, Julio Urías, Yu Darvish and Shohei Ohtani.
Poor Mark DeRosa. The Team USA manager has never managed before, and here he is expected to win the tournament but is hamstrung by a pitching staff without the biggest star power and with orders to satisfy 30 clubs with proper workload, game situations be damned. His answer has been to use a pitching script with “piggyback” starters—backing up one starter with another coming out of the bullpen.
And how has that worked out after games against Great Britain and Mexico? The four starters—Adam Wainwright, Kyle Freeland, Nick Martinez and Brady Singer—have coughed up 16 hits and nine runs in 11 2/3 innings for a 6.95 ERA.
What happened to Singer and Team USA on Sunday night proved the difficulty of threading the needle between competing and training.
Martinez wasn’t very sharp in his 2 2/3 innings, needing reliever Kendall Graveman to bail him out of a third-inning jam. The right move for DeRosa would have been to keep Graveman in the game after throwing just five pitches. But he could not. He is under orders not to bring back a reliever who has finished an inning—no matter how few pitches.
Godofredo A. Vásquez/AP Photo
So DeRosa, with Mexico already up, 3–1, put the game in the hands of Singer, the 26-year-old Royals starter who had never pitched in this kind of atmosphere at Chase Field—a packed house with most of the almost 50,000 flag-waving people rooting for Mexico. It showed.
“I thought he was a little excited, a little jumpy,” catcher Will Smith said.
On top of that, Singer admitted it was strange to be pitching in the middle of a game rather than at the start.
His fastball kept sailing so erratically that one of them skipped through the left-handed batter’s box while facing a right-handed hitter.
“I probably should have stepped off the mound, slowed it down a bit,” Singer said.
Still, Singer had two outs and a runner at second with Randy Arozarena, a great fastball hitter, in the box. He smartly threw Arozarena three straight breaking pitches. The one thing you cannot do with first base open, two outs and a dead fastball hitter at the plate is make a mistake with a fastball, which is exactly what Singer did.
“We were trying to go away with a fastball and freeze him,” Smith said. “It was up. He’s a great fastball hitter.”
Arozarena whacked it into the rightfield gap for a double. Now it was 4–1. It was about to get much worse. Nobody was throwing in the bullpen. Singer walked Alex Verdugo. Next up was Joey Meneses, who had homered off Martinez in the first inning. Still, nobody was throwing in the U.S. bullpen. In no regular-season world should Singer have pitched to Meneses, not with how erratic he had been, not with the game on the line at this moment. The No. 1 rule for a manager is never let a game get away from you.
DeRosa left Singer in. Why? He has guidelines from the players’ teams he must follow. Not only are relief pitchers barred from pitching into a second inning, they also are not permitted to pitch back-to-back days. And they are not allowed to get up in the bullpen a second time; once they start to throw, they are in the game or done for the night.
So, if DeRosa went to his bullpen at this critical point in the fourth, he was worried that he might not have enough arms to finish the game.
There was also the matter of Singer’s workload. He is a starting pitcher who needs to get stretched out to prepare for the season. He came into this game looking to throw 60 pitches, though truth be told he could have finished with a side session in the bullpen if didn’t get enough work on the game mound, as Freeland did after pitching against Great Britain.
Sure enough, Singer’s fastball betrayed him again. This one stayed up and in. Meneses crushed it for a three-run homer. Game essentially over.
Later, DeRosa allowed reliever Daniel Bard to wither through an ugly 33-pitch outing in which he sprayed his pitches and gave up four runs, putting the game even further out of reach. It took 28 pitches for anyone to even get up in the bullpen. Again, DeRosa was worried about using relief pitchers, knowing that to use someone to bail out Bard would put them off limits against Canada.
“So, yeah, it is tough,” DeRosa said. “Tonight was tough.”
Said Martinez bravely about the restrictions on pitchers, “You can play the victim to it or turn it into something in your favor. Tonight, Mexico turned it into their favor.”
Godofredo A. Vásquez/AP Photo
Two games in, Team USA has reached a crisis point. The MV3 at the top of their lineup—Mookie Betts, Mike Trout and Paul Goldschmidt—are 4-for-21 with no RBIs or extra-base hits. The offense has been good, but not good enough to overcome a pitching staff without the biggest stars and a rookie manager hamstrung by pitching restrictions.
It pained DeRosa to watch the game get away when he could not abide what his baseball instincts told him. With the tournament on the line Monday, he may have to find another way. He may need to go off script.
As DeRosa left the postgame interview room and pulled open a door to the clubhouse, he was asked whether against Canada he might use any of the four relievers he used against Mexico, which would mean getting a waiver to the no back-to-back restriction.
“We’ll see,” he said. “We’re going to talk about that right now and find out some answers.”
And then he pulled the door shut, hoping the same will not happen to his $2 billion team tonight against a Class A teenager from Newmarket, Ontario, two years out of high school.
