Was the World Baseball Classic rigged? I don’t mean to say that there was cheating on the field, bribery of officials, or anything like that. But a quick look at how the brackets panned out leaves one wondering if the pools weren’t set up to intentionally give Team USA an easy ride into the semifinals and force at least one superior team out of contention before they got there.
The semi-finals of the WBC back in 2006 featured four teams: Cuba, Japan, South Korea and the Dominican Republic. In this year’s classic, three of those teams — Cuba, Japan and South Korea — fed into the same quarterfinal pool. Cuba and Japan finished second and first respectively in the last classic and the Koreans won the gold in the Beijing Olympics. These are the three top teams on the international baseball scene, and they were all stacked up one side of the bracket.
On the other hand, the way the tournament was set up, the United States would only have to potentially face one of the semifinalists from 2006 — the Dominicans — on their way to the semifinals. In fact, the highly-touted Dominican Republic collapsed in the first round and Team USA didn’t even have to play them.
So the result was two quarterfinal pools, one which looked stacked, and the other just mediocre. Pool 1 featured Cuba, Japan, South Korea and Mexico. On the other hand, Pool 2 featured the United States, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and The Netherlands. Comparing the two side-by-side we see the same three baseball powerhouses mentioned earlier all lumped up in Pool 1, while Pool 2 featured some respectable squads but no one that was predicted to advance to the finals.
The conspiracy theorist in me, which I try unsuccessfully to repress, thinks that this was a setup. The United States, which has some kind of insecurity complex and gets all butthurt if anyone says it’s not the best at anything, didn’t even make it to the semifinals of the tournament it set up in 2006. By setting the bracket in such a way that they would have an easy schedule they guaranteed themselves, at worst, a fourth place finish (they ended up third).
They also guaranteed that one of the top three teams powerhouses in the game would not advance to the semifinals. By setting up one quarterfinal pool featuring all three top teams, from which only two can advance, obviously one of them had to go. No doubt there were many who were glad to see Cuba go. I know it pained a lot of people to see their gazillion dollar Dream Team bested by a bunch of semi-pros from a poor communist country year after year, which I’m sure was part of the appeal as putting them in the same pool as Japan and South Korea.
Don’t get me wrong. I was rooting for Team USA last night all the way. But I don’t think they deserved to make the semifinals while Cuba went home. USA’s record this WBC has hardly been impressive: they beat the Netherlands soundly but just eeked out a win against Canada and split vs. Puerto Rico and Venezuela. I don’t mean to be condescending but, aside from maybe Venezuela, none of those teams are really top-tier squads. Cuba, on the other hand, had to face Japan twice in the quarterfinals, which is what did them in.
What if the pools were set up as they were in 2006? The quarterfinals could have featured a matchup of USA vs. Cuba. That could have been embarassing and threatened the chances of USA advancing. So better to throw Cuba into the “random countries” pool B.
