TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Thursday, August 26, 2004

Cuba Libre, Australian Gold

The gold medal game went, rather predictably, to the Cubans, although not without some controversy. It can't be an Olympics unless there's an officiating controversy, right? I watched the game live, and there were four rather questionable calls against Team Australia. The most celebrated was the double off the wall by Brice of Australia, which would've given the Aussies two runs and a good shot at a third when they trailed 2-0 at the time. The centerfielder did a job of selling it, which most players would do, but the naked eye showed it bouncing off the wall, and the TV replays showed no ambiguity in the result. Tabares, however, gets major downs in sportsmanship for faking being hit by a ball in the sixth when the ball wasn't even close to him. The ump didn't buy it that time, but the level of shamelessness was pretty awful.

The controversy was not the blown call; it was that the umpires refused to confer over the call. Apparently there's a big macho thing about showing up an umpire by questioning his call in some baseball cultures, and the Australian manager, a very mild-mannered bloke, got run out by the left field umpire nearly instantly for asking him to get help. Who knows what's going on there. Normally I'd say it was just a bad call, but the bad calls were plentiful the whole game. In the first, there was no call made on an infield hit by a Cuban where the pitcher was blocked from throwing because the runner was on the left side of the baseline, not in the running box. In the fifth, Aussie first baseman Brian Kingman made a great circus play, tossing the ball between his legs on a bunt hit attempt by Tabares, the play-acting centerfielder. The runner was barely out...except the umpire was signaling safe even before the runner crossed the bag.

Much was made during the broadcast about the weird strike zone of the home plate umpire, which was inconsistent but in a non-partisan way. Kingman was up with the bases loaded and two out in the Australia fifth, its best chance at a big rally, and on a 2-2 pitch he took a borderline outside pitch from Odelin of Cuba. The catcher and pitcher sprinted off the mound, but the ump called it a ball. They both glared at the umpire in a sort of Clemens-like way. The very next pitch was in exactly the same place. Kingman, unsurprisingly, took it; it was called strike three.

Cuba really had the better team in terms of raw talent, both arms and bats, but the Aussies gave it a good go and the styles provided an interesting contrast. The Cubans play like, well, a combination of Stalinist and Latin stereotype. The club never sees a first pitch that it doesn't like swinging at, nor a borderline call against them they won't violently disagree with. The home run trot by Cepeda would've gotten a ball in his ear the next at-bat in any other league; it made Deion Sanders look subdued by comparison. The strategy was an odd mish-mosh of swinging for the fences and little ball: in the midst of a rally with four straight hits in the sixth, the Cubans sacrificed.

The Aussies, being Aussies, seemed pretty mellow about the whole thing. They're mostly minor leaguers, four-A guys except for Dave Nilsson (pudgier but still swinging a big stick at 35) and Graeme Lloyd, including my favorite, the medal game starter, John Stephens, a junkballer toiling away at Pawtucket and with a career minor league ERA hovering around 3.00. He can barely chuck the ball 85, and looks like a latter day John Burkett or maybe Mike Boddicker, but that kind of breaking stuff kept the free-swingers on Cuba off balance until he started losing his command in the sixth and got rung around with four straight hits. The whole club had that feeling of veteran wile about it, a club surviving on smarts more than skills.

But one can hardly blame the Cubans for being animated and emotional and willing to do nearly anything to win. The Cuban coach who lost the 2000 gold medal game to the US was sacked and hasn't been heard from. Players who fail to perform aren't just risking their livelihood, they risk losing their only source of food and that for their families. Players failing to demonstrate appropriate loyalty and who are considered defection risks are imprisoned. The Aussies should be proud and content to bag their first baseball medal, and losing the final game wasn't life and death to them, but it may literally have been so for a couple of the Cubans.

It's hard to begrudge the Cubans their medal -- but it's really hard to consider them Olympic champions in terms of Olympic ideals. The Japanese were the best team in the tournament -- Japan had to settle for a thrashing of Canada for the bronze after Australia slipped by them 1-0 in the semis. The Australians were the coolest.

posted by The Crank 11:57 AM