World Baseball Classic: Team Mexico is Done
By Jason Burke
In World Baseball Classic action last night, team Mexico had a four run lead entering the bottom of the 9th inning and ended up allowing five runs to cross the plate, effectively ending their chance to advance beyond Pool D.
Each and every pool in the World Baseball Classic has two teams that are the favorites to win their pools, and two underdog teams. We’ve already seen that an underdog team like Israel can push through to the next round of play, but there is a certain formula that goes into making it past the favorites. That formula is to beat the one team that is an underdog besides yourself and hope to beat one of the favored nations when you play them one-on-one.
By losing to the Italian squad on Thursday night, team Mexico now needs to defeat both the Puerto Rican team and the squad from Venezuela in order to have a chance at advancing. While Mexico has some solid players on their team like Sergio Romo, Roberto Osuna and Adrian Gonzalez, they definitely have some flaws.
Yovani Gallardo was the first starter to get the ball last night, which says something about their starting pitching, and it was Blue Jays closer Osuna that allowed the Italian comeback in the 9th with neither himself or Oliver Perez able to record a single out.
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The Puerto Rican club has some solid offensive performers like Carlos Correa, Francisco Lindor and Carlos Beltran to go along with the defensive stylings of Javier Baez that make them a formidable bunch. Their pitching staff may not quite measure up to some of the better teams in the tournament, but they should have a good enough team to down Mexico.
Venezula has an even better club, and for my money could be in the championship game in a couple of weeks. They have Jose Altuve, Miguel Cabrera, Rougned Odor, Salvador Perez, Victor Martinez and Carlos Gonzalez to do the heavy lifting offensively and one of the best defensive center fielders in baseball roaming the outfield in Ender Inciarte. I just don’t see a way that Mexico can beat both of these clubs and advance.
The best that they can hope for would be a three-way tie at 1-2 with one team sweeping and going 3-0 against all comers. The problem here is that in the instance of a three-way tie, the teams would need to be ranked, and the top two teams would play one another in a tiebreaker game. The first step towards ranking the clubs is a determination of the fewest runs allowed, divided by the number of innings played. This is effectively the team’s ERA.
After giving up ten runs in nine innings in their first game, their only hope of advancing would be for Italy to lose both of their remaining games and allow two runs more than Mexico; Puerto Rico to go 1-2 and Mexico to go 1-1 in their remaining games while also allowing two fewer runs than Italy. This would make it so that Mexico and Puerto Rico would meet in a tiebreaker game, which, again, is no gimme.