World Baseball Classic: Cuba 7, Chinese Taipei 1
The Cubans, a tournament-long disappointment, managed to advance as the Group’s champion by holding hosts to that single run at Taichung. That gave Cuba, which opened play with two losses, the best ratio of runs allowed to innings played.
By extension, it also made the five Cuban pitchers, none of whom worked three innings, the heroes. Collectively they held Taipei to just four hits, striking out 12.
Cuba scored six of its seven runs in the first two innings.
White Sox star Yoan Moncada finally got his act together. Moncada, who was having a bad tournament both at the plate and defensively, lined a one-out ground rule double in the first and came home with White Sox teammate Luis Robert on Alfredo Despaigne’s double.
He homered in the second to add a sixth run to the five Cuba ended up posting in the first, then capped off his performance with a seventh inning infield pop that fell.
The host team thus blew its chance to emerge with the group’s only 3-1 record. Instead, they were left to the tender mercies of the tie-breaker formula, which dropped Taipei all the way to last place. The dozen runs they allowed in a tournament-opening loss to Panama ended up being the fatal blow to Chinese Taipei’s hopes.