Venezuela upsets USA, wins World Baseball Classic
Team USA salutes the military and loses the plot, Musgrove goes on the IL and raises concerns about the Padres starting rotation, Tiger Woods tries to get healthy for the Masters, and a bunch more!
There was a time when I used to stream myself playing Out of the Park, which is a baseball simulation game. It’s been a few years, but I sometimes dream about doing it again because I find the whole idea fun.
I’m considering doing it again, assuming I can find time in my schedule (that aligns with the time that most people would be available to watch/chat along), for two very simple reasons.
One, the OOTP guys have once again gifted me with an early copy of this year’s game (they’re the best) and I would love if I could turn even one of my subscribers into a new OOTP convert to pay off their generosity.
Two, in recent years they have added the ability to start your campaign with any team at any time.
QUICK SIDE BAR: OOTP is a hyper-realistic simulation model, but that doesn’t mean that everything that happens in the real world is guaranteed to happen in the game if you go back in time (I had a friend who started back 40+ years and was horrified to see that his version of Tony Gwynn struggle to stay healthy throughout his career). After all, every outcome is the result of some combination of talent and luck.
I originally fired up OOTP27 and tried to play a bit with this year’s Padres team and quickly found out that….and this can happen….OOTP does not like this year’s Padres team. Almost none of the lottery ticket pitchers were worth a damn. Freddy Fermin struggled with the starting job. Tatis struggled and pouted. Morejon’s production fell off a cliff, for some reason. These are real things that could potentially happen, but when you have the ability to start over after a 2-15 start, it’s hard to not take it. So, I did.
I decided to instead start after the Padres Wild Card loss to the Cubs. I redid the offseason my own way, and got blessed by John Seidler deciding to invest in the team the way his brother Peter did instead of putting the team up for sale, allowing me to swing big for some higher-priced free agents.
Now, I have a fake Padres team that could theoretically battle the fake Dodgers for NL West supremacy and I want to show it off. Thus why I keep coming back to potentially reanimating my old Twitch account.
If you would watch, or are interested in hearing more about my fake OOTP Padres between now and the start of the actual MLB season, let me know!
Now, onto the links…
Baseball
World Baseball Classic: For Eugenio Suárez and Venezuela, WBC victory brings deluge of emotions, singing and so many tears - Yahoo Sports
Venezuela’s 3-2 victory over Team USA on Tuesday in the WBC final was, above all else, a deluge of emotion — for the players, for the fans, for an entire beleaguered nation of 33 million. All tournament long, those on the diamond and in the stands provided a volcano of joyous noise, a fitting soundtrack to a tournament that exists for the fun of it. There was drumming in the dugout, chanting in the seats and dancing in the streets, all very loud and very proud.
That symphony reached its crescendo at 10:36 p.m. local time courtesy of veteran slugger Eugenio Suárez. With the game knotted at two and a runner on second base, Suárez connected squarely with a poorly located Garrett Whitlock changeup. The ball crested gracefully into the left-center gap, finding a clean patch of grass. Runner Javier Sanoja jogged home from second into the waiting arms of his teammates, who had already streamed out of the dugout.
Star-studded Team USA upset as Venezuela wins first WBC title - The Athletic
In the ninth, Venezuela capitalized on an erratic outing by Boston Red Sox reliever Garrett Whitlock. Team USA manager Mark DeRosa indicated that he used Whitlock because San Diego Padres closer Mason Miller was only available in a save situation.
“Honoring the Padres,” DeRosa explained. When Suárez touched second base with his go-ahead double, he pointed both arms toward the sky. The Americans went quietly in the bottom of the inning, unable to conjure up any magic against Venezuelan closer Daniel Palencia.
Team USA Lost For The Troops - Defector
And here we see a shining example of the main peril of using sports as a reason to wrap oneself in the flag. When you look down and see that you’ve lost your pants, the flag makes a poor trouser substitute.
But hey, it’s the risk you run when you play that game, as Team USA and its main broadcast partner, Fox, learned to their embarrassment during Tuesday’s final of the World Baseball Classic. They assumed the best would happen because they were the United States of Baseball and their opponents were just Venezuela, whose government our government just overthrew for no real reason beyond boredom and the capacity to do so, only to find out that in baseball, if you have a choice between patriotism and a nasty bullpen, the wiser choice is to take the bullpen and skip the anthem.
The World Baseball Classic, Team USA, and the war problem - Pinstripe Alley
I think it says something about the American mind that this is how a collection of players from across the country would choose to market themselves. I’m writing this during the Oscars, where Sinners was widely recognized, a celebration of a very specific piece of American culture: blues music that became jazz that influenced nearly everything we hear today. The great musical history of the United States, the diversity of thought and ethnicity and language that creates some of the greatest cultural spaces in the world, goddamn Saturday morning cartoons. There are so many quintessential Americanisms, even Americanisms that Americans have made up to comfort themselves, and 30 ballplayers refused to wrap themselves in any of that. Instead, they wanted to align themselves with men whose sole concerns are whether they’ve purchased enough Tomahawks to replace the one they just slammed into the roof of a school.
Padres notebook: Germán Márquez rebounds; building relievers up - San Diego Union-Tribune
The rebound arrived after Márquez huddled with pitching coach Ruben Niebla. A small fix led to Márquez staying back in his delivery.
With Nick Pivetta, Michael King and Randy Vásquez locked for the top three spots in the rotation, Márquez is pushing for one of perhaps two spots.
Walker Buehler took a big step forward with five shutout innings on Monday. Márquez’s nine strikeouts on Tuesday are the most by a Padres pitcher so far this spring. He, Buehler and JP Sears, Marco Gonzales and Triston McKenzie are in the thick of the competition with one more turn through the order before the Padres play their final Cactus League game on Monday.
Elite stuff has Rodriguez in mix for roster spot - MLB.com
Rodriguez’s fastballs, both the four-seamer and sinker, can reach triple digits and typically sit between 96-99 mph. While neither pitch relies heavily on movement, the sheer velocity makes them difficult to square up. He leaned more on the four-seamer in the Majors, particularly against left-handers, while using the sinker to attack righties.
But it’s his changeup that separates him.
Padres signing ex-Red Sox pitcher would be a ‘no-brainer,’ MLB insider says - MassLive
“I’ve said for weeks that the San Diego Padres are a great fit considering, one: The questions in their rotation and two: How A.J. Preller loves stockpiling pitching depth,” Murray wrote. “Adding Giolito this close to Opening Day, especially with the questions surrounding Joe Musgrove’s status coming off Tommy John surgery, would be a no-brainer move. Preller should consider it, and I believe he is. Adding Giolito would give the Padres the necessary depth it needs ahead of Opening Day.”
Odds & Ends
San Diego FC head to Toluca with 3-2 lead, without Duah, Ingvartsen - East Village Times
Duah’s absence is particularly worrying as San Diego does not have much experience on the bench to cover that position. It seems that either Ian Pilcher or Osvald Soe will need to fill in alongside Christopher McVey.
Mikey Varas has more options to fill in Ingavrsten with Lewis Morgan as a possibility to get his first start of the year. Varas rested plenty of starters in San Diego’s last MLS match against FC Dallas. Anibal Godoy, Manu Duah, Luca Bombino, Marcus Ingvartsen and Onni Valakari were the usual starters that were in that starting 11.
Parallel successes lead to postseason tournaments for UCSD, San Diego State women - San Diego Union-Tribune
UC San Diego just capped a 24-8 season by winning a second straight Big West Tournament to earn a berth in the NCAA Tournament for a second straight season. The Tritons will play TCU at 9 a.m. Friday in Fort Worth, Texas.
The Aztecs won the Mountain West title this season with an unprecedented 19-1 conference record. But the regular-season champions were upset by Air Force in their opening Mountain West Tournament game, forcing the 25-5 Aztecs into a Women’s Basketball Invitation Tournament game Thursday night against UC Irvine at 6 p.m. at the Jenny Craig Pavilion at the University of San Diego. SDSU’s home court, Viejas Arena, is being used for the first and second rounds of the men’s NCAA Tournament.
NFLPA elects JC Tretter as executive director 8 months after he resigned from union - The Athletic
The union, which represents players in negotiations with the NFL on business matters including revenue sharing, salaries, working conditions, disciplinary actions and more, has elected former union president JC Tretter as its next executive director, the organization announced Tuesday.
Tretter, a former center who retired from the NFL in 2021 after eight seasons with the Green Bay Packers and Cleveland Browns, served as NFLPA president from 2020 to 2024. He then moved into an additional leadership role of chief strategy officer until resigning last summer, with controversy swirling around the players union.
Tiger Woods still mum on status for next month’s Masters - ESPN
Woods, 50, underwent lumbar disk replacement surgery in October. He also ruptured his left Achilles last March.
The 15-time major winner hasn’t played in an event since the Open Championship at Royal Troon in 2024. He has won the Masters five times, most recently in 2019.
WNBA, players reach verbal agreement on new CBA after marathon negotiations - The Athletic
After more than a year of tumultuous negotiations, more than a week of nearly nonstop discussions, and another day of talks that stretched into the early morning, the WNBA and its players union came to a verbal agreement on the terms of a new collective bargaining agreement.
The league and the WNBPA finally reached a deal after 2 a.m. Wednesday here to move forward with a new pact that will redefine the economic and governing rules of the WNBA going forward. The agreement, Breanna Stewart said, will be “transformational” for the league and its players.
Donald Trump Is Strangling Cuba To Death - Defector
What this looks like in practice is the total enclosure of the island and its 11 million people. Cuba has been contending with American economic warfare and sanctions of varying severity for over six decades. It remains an extremely poor country and, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, an increasingly isolated one. But over the past two months, the U.S. has squeezed tighter on Cuba than it has at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The already anoxic conditions have now reached a crisis point. Cubans face crippling food and medicine shortages, and their fuel supply is almost totally exhausted. Per an NBC News report on Tuesday night, there are currently 25 functioning ambulances, which shakes out to one ambulance per 440,000 people. Cuba experienced an islandwide blackout on Monday. It will not be the last one.
The UFC White House event is propaganda— just not good propaganda - Sports Politika
It appears that the hype is also as unjustified as it is obnoxious. When the UFC finally announced the fight card for the event last week, it fell short of Trump and White’s boasts. Instead of the “eight or nine” title fights promised by Trump, the event will feature exactly two: a lightweight championship fight between Ilia Topuria and Justin Gaethje in the main event, and an interim heavyweight title fight between Alex Pereira and Ciryl Gane. The four remaining primetime fights will feature a handful of fighters who are vocal Trump supporters such as Michael Chandler, who will face Brazilian fighter Mauricio Ruffy, and Bo Nickal, who will challenge Kyle Daukaus.
The lineup, to put it mildly, was not well received. Many fans lamented the missed opportunities to include veteran UFC stars such as Conor McGregor and Jon Jones. Even former UFC champion Ronda Rousey – once fiercely loyal to White and the UFC – admitted that “UFC’s White House card sucks”. But perhaps it was former UFC fighter Tom Lawlor who summed it up best when he tweeted: “LOL THATS IT?”