Adrian Gonzalez Has a Right to Be Angry About WBC Outcome

Five-time all-star Adrian Gonzalez is not happy about how his team was eliminated from the World Baseball Classic.

In fact, the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ first baseman who captains Team Mexico in the World Baseball Classic and whose brother Edgar manages the team, wants nothing to do with the tournament now, and in the future he plans to campaign against it.

Quite an odd turnaround for the 34-year-old who has played passionately for his country in all four WBC tournaments and had been considered the face of the Mexican team, but his turnaround is actually understandable.

So let’s start with what went wrong and why Gonzalez has become angry enough to vent to both reporters and on social media about the lack of validity of the tournament.

Last Sunday, after Mexico had lost the first two games of group play to Puerto Rico and Italy, Team Mexico came back to defeat Team Venezuela by the score of 11-9.

With Puerto Rico going undefeated and Italy, Mexico and Venezuela all finishing with the same record of 1-2 there was going to have to be a tiebreaker between two of those three teams.

The way those two teams were chosen became quite complicated. Los Angeles Times reporter Andy McCullough helped explain it like this,

The WBC broke the deadlock by calculating which team had allowed the fewest runs per defensive inning in the games the teams played against one another. The interpretation of the convoluted statistic created a discrepancy that led to Gonzalez’s distaste for the entire tournament.

In the end, it was Venezuela and not Mexico that faced Italy in the tiebreaker and Mexico was eliminated from the tournament.

To add fuel to the fire, Gonzalez felt like he could not get a straight answer from either Major League Baseball or the officials of the World Baseball Classic.

He told reporters that team officials had tried to contact both parties prior to Team Mexico’s game against Team Venezuela but received no response and had his team known the rules, their strategy in the game would have been different.

To make matters worse, during the game both MLB and other verified Twitter accounts reported that if Mexico won by two runs they would be in the tiebreaking game. This unfortunately was obviously not the case.

Team Mexico was under the impression that they had played a total of 18 innings but word started to spread that they were only being given credit for 17 innings because they did not record an out in their final inning in their walk-off loss to Italy in their first game of pool play.

More from World Baseball Classic

• It’s time we give the World Baseball Classic the respect it deserves
• The problems and possibilities of MLB expansion into Japan
• World Baseball Classic: Why it was a success and necessary
• Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout’s WBC duel was potential taste of future
• World Baseball Classic: Shohei Ohtani polishes off Mike Trout, Team USA

The missing inning or partial inning caused their runs per defensive innings score to rise, thus eliminating from them from the tournament.

Mexico filed a protest saying they’d been told that a partial inning would be counted when calculating the number of runs, but MLB stepped in and said that Mexico did not get credit because they did not record an out.

This left Gonzalez confused and absolutely furious and he let the entire world know it via his personal Twitter account. He even tweeted the definition of the word “partial” and directed it straight to Joe Torre, MLB’s chief baseball officer.

Even MLB Network’s own Jon Paul Morosi tweeted that he agreed with Gonzalez and not the ruling that had been made:

Gonzalez had more choice words than just the ones he used on Twitter telling reporters that the tournament could try but they were,

“not even close to being the Little League World Series.”

And that,

“It’s not good to be back (at Dodger’s camp), but it’s good to be the hell out of that tournament.”

Major League Baseball issued an apology that their media outlets had gotten ahead of themselves reporting that Mexico would continue on to the tiebreaker if they won by two runs, but pushing their mistakes on to the media did not satisfy Gonzalez and understandably so.

He’s correct that the team could have strategized and attempted to play differently to score more runs had they known they needed to.

They might not have accomplished it, however, they would have known that it was not an option to win by just two runs.

It was the lack of communication from Major League Baseball and World Baseball Classic officials, who didn’t get back to Team Mexico that caused this incident.

Instead by letting their respective Twitter accounts do the talking without full knowledge of the rules, they’ve cost Mexico one of their most well-known and important players.

Gonzalez will not only refuse to play in the World Baseball Classic in 2021, he will now actively campaign against it.

Next: WBC: A pair of eighth inning home runs leads USA to victory

Former Detroit Tigers manager Jim Leyland is currently managing Team USA in the World Baseball Classic.