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.
Let’s explain this in simpler terms. The better team won, 3-2, because its most important players made the most of their moments. Other than one thigh-high changeup that Bryce Harper T-shirt-cannoned beyond the center field wall in the eighth inning to offer the U.S. a 2-2 tie and the escape hatch it had not deserved, the Americans were owned on their own soil before a predominantly hostile crowd. Let that sentence rattle around your brain as needed. The home team was owned by the other guys’ fans, and then owned decisively by the other guys. The best you can say about Harper’s homer is that it almost led to an injustice. The better team won, and did so on the merits.
The Americans managed three hits and had nobody in scoring position beyond the brief duration of Harper’s home run trot. Not that the Venezuelans electrified the air either; their runs came on Maikel Garcia’s one-out sacrifice fly, Wilyer Abreu’s leadoff homer in the fifth, and Eugenio Suarez’s ninth-inning double, which scored pinch runner/base stealer Javier Sanoja. Who, for the record, was on base because Team USA’s Garrett Whitlock managed to do the one thing more difficult than striking out Luis Arráez—getting him to take a walk.
No, the difference came when the Venezuelans were tasked with slapping the smug out of the American pregame show. That presentation reeked of Captain America–style mythmaking, and was rich in oily hyperbolic patrio-blather from the Fox pregame desk gang. The entry into the stadium looked every bit like the Major League teams who wanted to show their support for the military during World War I by making their players march around the field with wooden rifles performing close order drill. Know the crowd, play the crowd, be the crowd, and all that.
Venezuela answered all that pomp and production value with a Seattle Mariner (Eduard Bazardo), a San Francisco Giant (Jose Butto), a Milwaukee Brewer (Angel Zerpa), an Orix Buffalo (Andres Machado), and a Chicago Cub (Daniel Palencia), all of whom echoed and supported starter Eduardo Rodriguez (Arizona Diamondbacks) by never leaving a pitch where it could be harmed. With the single exception of Machado’s 1-0 mistake to Harper, the Venezuelans were damn near perfect. Some of that was just that, being Major Leaguers themselves, they were unfazed by facing Major Leaguers. The rest, and the finer part of it, was just meeting the moment.
Put another way, the only Americans who hit a ball to the outfield at all were Harper (twice), Bobby Witt Jr. (twice), Will Smith, and Pete Crow-Armstrong. Aaron Judge, Fox’s anointed Captain America, struck out thrice and grounded meekly to third in his other plate appearance. Kyle Schwarber, tragically on-brand, struck out three times and walked. Each inning’s leadoff hitters combined to go 0-for-9. All of which is to say that Team USA were lucky to get the two runs they got. That’s not getting any ticker-tape parades or invitations to the national Big Mac table to hobnob with the First Gladhander. To the extent that he processes baseball at all, he likes teams that don’t get shut down by a bunch of guys freely available on most fantasy leagues’ waiver wires.
If you think this comeuppance is a lesson in the perils of patriotic pandering, well, never mind. The Venezuelans did the same flag-as-superhero-cape motifs that the Americans would have had they won, and their pride was every bit as nationalistic as the losing side’s would have been had they managed to put any runners on base. That’s what the WBC is selling, after all; it feels more significant when every other meaningful thing is as upside down as everything is right now, but it was, as it always was, a game. A game that, for the record, sat squarely north of any All-Star Game but well short of any playoff game in every way except for volume; the crowd made sure to leave that last bit squarely in the rearview. The Venezuelans could be forgiven for spreading a little schadenfreude. Beating anyone at their own game is always satisfying, even if, as in this case, that game has been Venezuela’s as well for the last century and change. The Venezuelans just knew and acted on the one geopolitical truism that outshines all the others—99 up and away with movement beats a rote round of rallying ’round the flag any old time.
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