More Classic baseball
The World Baseball Classic provided another group of exciting games on Sunday.
I wasn’t able to watch any of them live, which meant that this morning served as a trial run for the season ahead. As a British baseball fan, the morning MLB.com visit becomes part of your daily routine. You wake up, fix yourself some breakfast and then log on to see what happened in MLB while you were asleep.
Invariably this will start with a visit to your chosen team’s home page. As the page loads, you cross your fingers and repeat in your mind “win, win, win” before the outcome of the previous night’s game finally reveals itself. It can either get your day off to a bad start or see you heading off to work with a spring in your step. As an A’s fan, the balance of grumpy and happy days leaned firmly towards the former last year, but I’m hopeful that 2009 may be different.
Anyway, this morning’s MLB.com visit led me straight to the four WBC Recap clips.
The big shock was Australia’s thumping win over Mexico. It is always dangerous to count out the Aussies. Their sporting pedigree is second to none, as any English cricket/rugby fan can testify. After winning the silver medal in the 2004 Olympics (demoting a very talented Japanese team – including Dice-K, Kuroda, Fukudome and Jojima – into third place), Australia fell back to earth with a bump when they failed to even qualify for the 2008 event. Of course, the make-up of the team changes slightly when the WBC comes around, but I thought they might see this as an opportunity to put that disappointment behind them and they’ve certainly started off in impressive fashion.
Elsewhere, Cuba had a comfortable win over South Africa, the Dominican Republic put their opening defeat to the Netherlands behind them with a 9-0 victory over Panama (sending the latter out of the WBC) and America booked their place in round two with a resounding 15-6 win over Venezuela.
The highlight of the day was Adam Dunn’s bomb to right field at the Rogers Center. While it was great news for the Nationals, I’m still mystified as to why a play-off contender (and I’m sure Nats fans won’t take offense at me taking their team out of that bracket) didn’t pick him up. A two year/$20m contract looks very reasonable. Although he is poor in the field, Dunn’s production will outstrip what the majority of AL teams will get from their DH spot this season.
In particular, he would have made a massive difference to the Twins’ batting lineup. It’s easy to focus on deals that are made and which go wrong, but sometimes the more costly decisions are where you take a pass on a player.
Dunn’s WBC performance may have a few GM’s questioning whether they made a mistake this off-season.
However, that’s for later. Right now, Korea and Japan have just started the latest instalment in what’s becoming an epic rivalry. Korea will be out for revenge after their loss via the ‘mercy’ rule a couple of days ago.
The games just keep on coming. It’s a great time of year.
BaseballGB on MLBlogs 
I agree with your opinion on Dunn. He is such a valuble commodity once defense is taken out of the equation. If he was slotted into almost any AL lineup he would fit perfectly in a DH role. Not many people have the power and ability to draw a walk like he does and he came at a relativly cheap price too.
http://benchadwick.mlblogs.com/