LOS ANGELES
Evan Longoria after striking out against Japan.
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There was a troubling refrain from Team USA players on Sunday after a 9-4 loss to Japan in the semifinals of the World Baseball Classic.
Japan did the little things, they said, and the United States did not. Japan played with basics and fundamentals; the United States did not.
“They play with passion,” shortstop Jimmy Rollins said. “We play with passion, but they just wear theirs on their sleeves.”
Players repeatedly referred to the Japanese team’s attention to detail as if it were a foreign concept or a long-lost art. The refrain makes you wonder whether the United States might have lost more than a baseball game on Sunday.
Brian Roberts, the team’s second baseman, said: “When you play Japan, when you play Korea and those countries, they’re going to play fundamentally sound baseball. They’re going to do all the little things. You have to focus on the fundamentals. Americans, we probably don’t do as good a job of that as they do at times.”
Rollins added: “They don’t worry about the big things. They didn’t worry about trying to drive the ball out of the ballpark. When you put the ball in play, you can find holes.”
Didn’t Wee Willie Keeler say something like this nearly a century ago when he said, “Hit ’em where they ain’t”? It was as if the United States was being reintroduced to a game it invented. The American game, for better or for worse, has moved to lavish new stadiums and supports lucrative player contracts. It is built on power and entertainment — a deadly combination, we’ve discovered, in an era of performance-enhancing drugs.
Meanwhile, nations like Japan and South Korea have learned our game, digested it and improved upon it by going back to the basics.
“The world has caught up with us,” Bob Watson, a Major League Baseball vice president, said after Sunday’s loss.
Watson helped put together the United States team that won the gold medal at the 2000 Sydney Games. In a span of nine years, other nations have caught up and, some say, have passed the United States in international competition.
“It’s basically like basketball,” Watson said. “Until we get the commitment from the players and owners to be involved in this 100 percent, we’re going to find that it’s going to be a struggle.”
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Until the United States lost, most of the conversation in the tournament had focused on how to improve the tournament itself. The most popular suggestion was to compress it and reduce the downtime.
“There’s a reason why the game is played every day,” shortstop Derek Jeter said. “Everyone would tell you the same thing: you get in shape but more importantly you get into a rhythm, you get into a rhythm offensively, defensively, on the bases. I don’t know how it could happen, but it would be an ideal situation to play every day.”
For Team USA, the concern goes further. How can the United States, with all of its major league stars, win the Classic?
This is a challenge for the nation: how to identify, nurture and develop homegrown talent. How to teach the basics. Jeter marveled at the speed with which the Japanese hitters raced down the line after they put the ball in play. “They don’t strike out,” he said. “Everybody puts the ball in play. They all run. The left-handers are halfway down the line when they put the ball in play. If I could do it or teach it, I would.”
At the same time, Jeter was not ready to concede that American baseball had slipped into oblivion. “I wouldn’t go around calling it someone else’s game just because we lost a game tonight,” he said.
Manager Davey Johnson also dismissed the notion that the United States’ loss was a referendum on the quality of baseball in the country.
He said that Japan’s training schedule, which began in December, gave the team a head start.
“It’s just one game,” he said. “Some of our pitchers aren’t as far along as some of the Japanese pitchers. It does give them a head start when you play them in early March, but all in all we put on a good show and we could have easily won this game.”
Major League Baseball continues to represent the best baseball has to offer, largely because great players from Asia, Central America, South America and North America compete on major league rosters.
The problem the World Baseball Classic underlined is, what happens to the United States when major leaguers return to their countries to play?
And that raises a more troubling question: Did the United States lose a semifinal game on Sunday? Or have we lost the game itself?
