You've got to love how quickly people can try to shift the narrative. For most of the World Baseball Classic, we were told time and again how the United States wasn't taking the thing seriously enough. Too many players lacked the proper patriotic zeal and those that did play were more concerned with preparing for the season, especially when compared to players from other countries.
The story changed on Sunday night, though. A 9-4 semi-final loss to Japan prompted questions about whether or not the United States could still call itself the world's finest baseball nation. Claims that the sky was falling weren't hard to come by.
"Can you believe this? Look at the score. I feel so bad about this,'' Tommy Lasorda said. "We had high hopes. This is the second time we were supposed to win. We taught these people the game.''
It's nice of Tommy to play the role of ambassador like that. Lasorda's ignorance is shocking, especially when the Dodgers have had so many players from Asia help them in the last 15 years. This wasn't an upset, it was a fairly routine baseball game.
The U.S. lost a game to a good team, mostly because Daisuke Matsuzaka outpitched Roy Oswalt. Throw in a couple of errors in the bottom of the eighth and that's that. Happens all the time in baseball. Imagine how different the annals of baseball history would look if one game was always given so much weight.
Tom Seaver got knocked out of games in the first inning, Hank Aaron went 0-for-4 and Juan Pierre has 13 career home runs, which all illustrate that baseball is a game best looked at from a macro level. Japan beat the United States on Sunday, but if they played Monday it could go the other way around and both sides know it. Davey Johnson and Derek Jeter, among others, said as much when they were asked about this "massive" moment in baseball history, just as Ichiro Suzuki would say if the game had gone the other way.
You can't have it both ways. If the U.S. didn't put forth their best effort and best team, then how could the game represent some sea change? Just as a U.S. win wouldn't have meant anything about the strength of Japanese baseball, the Japanese one doesn't mean anything outside of nine innings on one Sunday evening in Los Angeles.
Sports
Josh Alper is a writer living in New York City and is a contributor to FanHouse.com and ProFootballTalk.com in addition to his duties for NBCNewYork.com.
