Thursday saw some Pittsburgh Pirates pitchers get work during exhibition warm-up games for the World Baseball Classic. Early Friday morning had a game of note in the WBC.
Tsung-Che Cheng helped Chinese Taipei to victory with an early RBI single that tied the game 2-2 vs Italy. He ended up going 1-for-4, after three hits in the first game.
As for the games that didn’t involve any Pirates, Japan beat Korea 13-4. Czech Republic beat China 8-5. Cuba beat Panama 13-4. There are two games tonight, then Friday is the busy day, with eight games throughout the day. That includes USA vs Great Britain at 9 PM.
Tahnaj Thomas had a rough inning for Great Britain. He allowed four earned runs on one hit, two walks and a hit batter, while facing the Kansas City Royals.
Rob Zastryzny got the start for Canada against the Seattle Mariners. He allowed two runs on five hits in two innings, with no walks and one strikeout.
Santiago Florez pitched for Colombia against the Chicago White Sox. He allowed one run on one hit and one walk in one inning.
Here’s Wednesday’s recap in case you missed it, as well as yesterday’s recap that included work from Roansy Contreras. Here’s our WBC preview, which has the schedule for the tournament.
John started working at Pirates Prospects in 2009, but his connection to the Pittsburgh Pirates started exactly 100 years earlier when Dots Miller debuted for the 1909 World Series champions. John was born in Kearny, NJ, two blocks from the house where Dots Miller grew up. From that hometown hero connection came a love of Pirates history, as well as the sport of baseball.
When he didn't make it as a lefty pitcher with an 80+ MPH fastball and a slider that needed work, John turned to covering the game, eventually focusing in on the prospects side, where his interest was pushed by the big league team being below .500 for so long. John has covered the minors in some form since the 2002 season, and leads the draft and international coverage on Pirates Prospects. He writes daily on Pittsburgh Baseball History, when he's not covering the entire system daily throughout the entire year on Pirates Prospects.
Robbie Glendenning having himself quite a WBC. Glad to see it, he’s still got a shot to make the bigs.
Since we don’t have a game thread, I will post here that T-Swag looked good on that two run bomb off Zack Wheeler. And Cruz now has two home runs to go with his 2 strikeouts. In about 20 at bats.
I thought Swaggerty looked late on fastballs in his first 2 AB’s (didn’t see the single). The HR came off a hanger of all hangers. But it is spring training and not the middle of the season.
Not sold yet but I’d like to see it happen.
Game threads are supposed to be the Daily article, where we post the lineup at the bottom of the article once it becomes available. I guess I should have mentioned that more often, but the first few days were getting good responses/comments, so I assumed everyone knew, or would soon know.
My bad.
No worries, I only mentioned it three times and each time it was an update at the bottom of the daily article, so if you only checked the article early, you would have never seen it
One interesting part of the WBC is the Cuban team. They have a couple big names, such as Yoan Moncada, Luis Robert, & Yoenis Cespedes (who looks to have lost a step & dropped a pivotal fly ball vs Italy). But there’s alot of other MLB guys that weren’t invited bc of old hard feelings due to them defecting, & also a group of players trying to assemble the WBC team on their own, outside of governmental influences. Very strangely, somehow Aroldis Chapman is on team Great Britan. The result is that the Cuban team is not very good.
Chapman’s dad is Jamaican, which makes him eligible for the Great Britain team
Jamaica is an independent sovereign country since 1962 approx…..must be another Manfred interpretation.
That would still make him eligible for the team, his family history runs very deep in Jamaica, well before 1962. Let’s assume his mom wasn’t Cuban. Where else would a Jamaican player play in the WBC? Jamaica itself couldn’t make a team good enough to compete in the Dominican Summer League. That’s why they came up with the rules. Not so an All-Star like Chapman could pick and choose, but so players with no other options could play. It’s also designed to help teams that otherwise wouldn’t be able to play in the WBC without being completely embarrassed. If they only had players born in the United Kingdom playing, there’s zero chance they would be in the WBC right now. The sport isn’t popular there. The overall goal of the WBC is to make the sport popular worldwide.