100% agree. I am always a bit saddened by most people's utter lack of curiosity. But we've moved past that to open pride in idiocy.
And even funnier, the USA just lost to Italy, so they might even be eliminated from the tournament entirely. The Italian team is basically composed of Italian Americans.
I think people get more upset when US citizens choose another country OVER the US. In the case of 99% of the Americans playing for other teams at the WBC, that isn't really the case because they aren't good enough to play for the US anyway (a few like Aaron Nola and Nolan Arenado were but are past their prime now, the vast majority are career minor leaguers/cup of coffee guys at best...although of course now we need Nola to save us). Nobody is angry that, say, Alex Roldan is playing for El Salvador. In the case of soccer (less applicable in baseball) it also matters to the public where the player grew up, guys who spent most or all of their childhood in the US are rightly or wrongly expected to identify as Americans much more so than guys who might have had an American parent but grew up primarily overseas. If we miss out on Banks for example people will be disappointed of course but I don't think anyone will begrudge him--he spent most of his childhood in Germany after all. Someone like Giuseppe Rossi or Jonathan Gonzalez is a different story.
Not entirely because, but in large part because no one on the team had any idea that the game meant anything. DeRosa, the manager -- who, by the way, has never managed a professional team -- said before the game that the team was already through. That despite the fact that the game didn't mean anything, they really wanted to win anyway. He talked about the team celebrating after the game versus Mexico and how some guys were likely hung over. He put out a lineup with washed up Paul Golschmidt -- who was the 5th worst hitter in baseball last year against right handers -- against a right handed starter. Instead of Bryce Harper, a lefty hitting machine. He pitched his worst bullpen arms and kept them in as they were getting shelled. Then in the bottom of the seventh, he got Clayton Kershaw up to pitch the eighth -- who is retired and was picked by DeRosa because, I dunno, Clayton wanted to go? At that point, someone seemed to figure out we shouldn't give up any more runs, because Kershaw went down and Mason Miller, one of the best relievers in baseball, got up. After the game, he claimed he merely misspoke, but no, the moron didn't know the game mattered. Neither did any of the players, apparently. Imagine if Pochettino punted the third game of our group this summer because he didn't bother to understand the tie breakers?
There's a lot to be cynical of with the WBC. ...................but that Czech electrician pitching 4 2/3rd shutout innings against defending champion Japan is what i love. [I know he has other performances like that in the past.] That's the kind of story I love. That's the romance of sports at its best. The Japanese fans giving him an ovation as he walked off the field was truly awesome. When it comes to baseball, we're the ugly giant that everybody wants to see lose. We're England. There's an arrogance to the way we behave.
This is wildly overblown hysterics. I knew before coming here that this kind of take would be rampant, but it remains wrong-headed to see societal collapse or triumph within sporting events. Ironically, it's actually quite... idiodic.... I say again, the WBC is not a good barometer for relative baseball ability. Having one-off games in a little tournament like the WBC when baseball seasons are designed to be grueling, and the playoffs are 5/7 games long, would be like having World Cup in soccer with 5-minute halves. It would still be soccer, but it's not over nearly a long enough timescale to matter. Baseball is all about hundreds, thousands of iterations of events that determine champions, because it's trying to minimize outliers (a process which, of course, creates fun outliers like DiMaggio's untouchable 56-game hitting streak) and determine results. The top baseball nations should be playing each other in home-and-away best-of-5 or best-of-7 series, not one-off preseason games. If they aren't going to do that, then it's not a real baseball competition; it's just a baseball spectacle. Undeniably fun, but undeniably fake.
No, what's idiotic is thinking I'm talking about results. Thirty plus people were involved in USA Baseball. Not a single one understood the tie break rules before the late seventh inning of yesterday's game. It's a massive level of arrogance and idiocy to not understand the rules of the competition you are playing. The manager thought they were already through and managed to it. The players partied the night before and the manager said in a press conference they were hung over. But please, tell me I'm talking about "small sample size." Obviously, a manager not understanding the tie break rules is totally small sample size. As for society not being curious, there's actually a whole slew of documentation around the decline of critical thinking, but you do you!
I got your point the first time: you're using one manager's rules brain fart and hungover players in the WBC as proof of America's terminal pride in ignorance. But that's lazy as hell. A coaching staff screwing up a rare, complicated tiebreaker in an every-few-years exhibition tournament—where the roster is a mid-offseason pickup squad—does not indict 330 million people or prove cultural collapse. It's a dumb mistake in a niche context, not a societal smoking gun. Sports screw-ups make great memes and morality tales, but turning one into evidence of broad decline is cherry-picking dressed up as insight. The WBC isn't a national IQ test; it's a side gig for pros who treat it as fun, not life-or-death. The US didn't know the WBC tiebreaker rules. The Seahawks threw the Super Bowl away at the goal line instead of running Marshawn Lynch. Bah, guess we should just pack it up, everyone's a moron now. I'll take your "documentation around the decline of critical thinking" at face value, because people's brains have gotten screwed up from using iPads as babies, but it's not just the kids' fault they can't think. The people who are supposed to be teaching them critical thinking suck, too, and bear some blame for their poor performance. And the "decline of critical thinking" isn't just in the US at all.
Luckily it didn't matter. The cosplaying Italian Americans did their job so now we're back in the game! [Their stupid espresso machine celebration is cringe-worthy.] There were consequences, though. Now will likely have to face DR in the semifinal. The truth is that if this was the World cup, we'd expect somebody from the federation to pull the coach aside and say "Actually coach, we haven't advanced yet. Here's the situation." Sometimes the coaching staff is so knee deep in the preparation for games, that they aren't aware of those details. As we said earlier in the thread. You're as good in baseball as your starting pitcher. We didn't lose that game because DeRosa didn't know the rules. We lost it due to Nolan McLean's poor performance. [Amongst others.] He's a Met, though, so we should have known he'd choke when it matters the most.
There's really no excuse for DeRosa. It's his job to know the tie breaker. Guy's a moron and he was arrogant and lazy. So were most of the players -- basically every baseball fan I know asked the simple question of what it takes to go through. The fact that these guys didn't is absolutely evidence of both arrogance and a lack of curiosity. To my point, these are completely different: No, these aren't close. One is a coach trying to catch the defense off guard and overthinking. The other is arrogance and laziness. If Carroll didn't know that you could go for two points on a touchdown conversion or something -- that'd be comparable. I don't particularly think that this instance is some bellweather that proves the decline of our society. You are right in that -- one instance like this is about these individuals and isn't some kind of smoking gun. It can be and is indicative, though. There's a difference between the two. It's absolutely one data point in a thousand, or maybe a million. The advent of AI is only going to exacerbate it, as people outsource thinking. I'm amazed at how dependent people on here are on it already, even when it consistently posits factual inaccuracies and the such. But it doesn't seem like everyone cares much about actually being right. I'm not sure what set you off, but is it merely the American-ness of it all? I don't think we're the only culture that has these issues, but we're surely ahead of many other western nations in terms of our national arrogance, the current cultural rejection of education and expertise for celebrity and feelings. We can take many pieces of evidence to look at this: the dismantling of our health apparatus, our rejection of science in health discussions, etc is just one. We have someone completely unqualified heading up our nation's health apparatus because simply, people don't want to look at evidence or what can be proven -- it's now all vibes. Health recommendations are now a culture war. As is war -- we have a talk show host running a war no one can seem to put a goal on. I am sure the lack of critical thinking is a general human condition and lord knows there's plenty of cultures of with unearned arrogance -- it's not just America. But America is what I see. Carl Sagan called it in the Demon-Haunted World. I think people's rejection of hard reality and critical thinking is only going to get worse as tech gets past the point that most people can understand on even a basic level. This was written in 1995:
I'm an Eagles fan and we famously tied a regular season game against the Bengals ~20 years ago in part because Donovan McNabb didn't know the rules and took too much time at the end of OT. Also, since it was brought up....while the specific play call was dumb, throwing the ball on that down was 100% the right thing to do for Seattle in that SB.
Just gotta make sure Poch is aware of all tiebreakers and that being in 3rd place does not guarantee you advancement
Obviously DeRosa should've known the rules. Even if he didn't know what they were, he should've kept his mouth shut until the game was over, not imply players didn't take the tournament seriously and were not going to be in great shape for the Italy game because of a late night. It means he, and the players, didn't take the tournament seriously, like they all claimed they were going to do, which turns a historic underperformance into a historic underestimation of the opponent. But I'm not going to go point by point because what sets me off is perhaps more pertinent than arguing whether or not the Seahawks should or shouldn't have thrown the ball (they shouldn't have, this retroactive contrary narrative that has sprung up -that it's some clever piece of coaching- needs to die, every statistical model supports running the ball heavily, but believe what you want). I am sick and tired of every sports event being seen as a launchpad into talking about contemporary society writ large. It's just sports. It's not "indicative" of squat. I don't care about the fear-mongering over AI and how people will "outsource thinking". I don't care about what Carl Sagan said in 1995 about tech elites setting agendas and everyone degrading into morons because of "soundbites". I don't care about what people think of the current Administration or people's trust in institutions, or the fact that so many things have become part of broad "culture wars". I'm in a Sports forum where people are pretending to be interested in the World Baseball Classic, but are actually interested in sharing pessimistic takes about how all the young people today are brainless morons. Sagan isn't a soothsayer, he's just another voice in the endless bemoaning of imminent societal collapse. We have thousands of years of people bemoaning that the previous generations were great, but the future was rotten because people would be too busy reading scrolls instead of experiencing life for themselves, or listening to radio or watching TV or "insert moral panic here". The collapse hasn't happened yet, but if you think it's imminent, go to one of the many NSR forums and chat about it there. You want to talk about the WBC and what's going on there? Sounds good. You want to bemoan "culture wars", American arrogance, and societal collapse, then we should make another thread.
There is a massive difference between not taking the time, at any point in your tenure as a hired manager, to not learn the tie break rules, and making a decision that is not in line with the averages of a situation in the moment. Statistical models are great and I often support them, but they are, by definition here, things that model reality and give advice as to the best overall decision in a general situation, but they are neither specific to the exact moment, or in this case, even the opponent. And even then, they are not determinative. The on-average right decision fails often. Whereas the tie break rules aren't changing. There was no 70% chance here involved. This was just either arrogance or laziness or both that they didn't bother doing five minutes of work. That's fair. That's up to you. But it doesn't make any of these things untrue, either. We won't get into it, because you don't want to talk it, but no, Sagan wasn't a good old days kind of guys bemoaning the youth. It's an entire book full of evidence of a societal and cultural shift away from evidence based thinking and science. And it's been proven out. There's plenty of "kids these days" talk out there for sure, but there's also actual shifts and trends. It's very clear human brains are not and were not ready for the a lot of the massive rate of change on the last century and the century ahead, and we are very much struggling with it. But we can talk baseball as well.
Baseball is as unpredictable as soccer. Perhaps even more so. The best baseball teams win about 60% of their games. (like 100 out of 162). So in a one-off game, anything can happen. Canada is lining up competent MLB pitchers in the game tonight. You're only as good as your next day's starting pitcher in that sport. The problem in the group phase for the US was the arrogance to not believe for a millisecond that they'd lose the game. That we'd show up with our stars and bombs away. No chance of losing. Why would we bother knowing the tiebreakers????? Listening to DeRosa thru the whole process has been like nails on a chalkboard for me. A lot of jingoistic nonsense. Almost bordering on a form of Manifest Destiny. Are they actually preparing properly? There were stories about the guys partying late into the night after the Mexico win. DeRosa even joking that there were a lot of guys "dragging" a day later. Sometimes a team deserves to get punched in the mouth.
Well, they won. I find myself, much to my surprise, not rooting for USA Baseball. Why? I haven't put my finger on it yet. They don't represent me like the USMNT does. Maybe its because we're the underdog in soccer, and I like that. There's just an arrogance to USA Baseball that's off-putting to me. Like having Seal Team Six, the team that killed Bin Laden, giving a pregame speech to the team yesterday. Amping them up like they're storming the beaches of Normandy.
I like this tournament for the most part as stated before. But today really rubs me the wrong way. A PR National team with passion and pride in their baseball loses to a bunch of Italian American dudes that have no connection at all to Italy. Italy is a country that couldn't care less about baseball. Just seems wrong in every way.
I get it, whether fair or not having the administration butting in with sports has “tainted” them in my eyes slightly… Its created this environment where there is seemingly a boorish aura around the athletes/teams. The whole situation with the US vs Italy match reeked of that Im just waiting for the USMNT to be the next prop used by the administration maybe some kind of “…not one, not two, but 6 World Cups” moment. I just want it to happen before the tournament so I can completely check out. like for WBC I almost wish for a US vs Italy final just to see the “italians” win again