Congratulations To Samurai Japan

I really should start talking more about the niches that are pertinent to this blog, but baseball is a big thing in my life, so I’ll blog about it today if you don’t mind.

Anyways, so last night, Japan beat my country, South Korea, 5-3 in the 2nd World Baseball Classic finals. It was a really entertaining match with Korea levelling the score in the 9th inning with 2 outs. However, Ichiro helped Japan pull off the win with a double RBI single off of Chang Yong Lim.

As a Korean, I feel a bit bad (or more like terrible) considering that we lost to our archrivals, Japan, in a Classic finals, although we did have our second unit playing the tournament this time. I guess if you’re a Red Sox fan or a Yankees fan and your team lost to the other in the World Series, you might feel me a bit. Anyways, with the game done over 6 hours ago, I still feel somewhat upset about the result, which I felt definitely was leaning our way, until the terrible umpire calls and questionable sportsmanship plays killed us ultimately.

This is one of the plays occured. The Korean player here is the second baseman making a double play. However, the Japanese player, Nakajmia, instead of sliding into the base, stretches his arm to disrupt the double play. I was appalled to see this level of sportsmanship as beyond the result of the game, things like this can seriously injure the player. Also, from the first inning, the umpire was calling extremely odd calls which even the ESPN commentator seemed to be surprised at. Anyways, the result is a loss for us, and that’s that. However, things like this really makes me not want to watch the WBC anymore as we suffered from the WBC’s refereeing and tournmanet system in the first one too. The best record in both WBCs, yet it’s going unrewarded.

While overall, the tournament was entertaining, I still feel like the structure of the tournament is a complete mess. Korea and Japan both played 9 games durring the Classic, but they met each other on 5 different occassions. This is striking and while the baseball force has definitely taken a huge step towards East Asia, the entire tournament seemed almost too much of a Korea-Japan series with a few countries here and there to entertain the guests.

Anyways, fellow baseball fans, let’s hope for a better Classic in 2013.