On March 3, MHN Sports highlighted the youth national baseball team’s loss to Chinese Taipei.
Based on the opinions of major league scouts who watched the game on the field, we emphasized that the team shown on the screen was not what it used to be. We also pointed out that the quality of the game itself was an issue, as both teams combined to throw more than 20 wild pitches in the phoenix game on the same day.온라인카지노
As time went on, however, it became clear that this view was flawed. There was nothing wrong with the team that was supposed to win the title in the first place. The bigger problem was the unbridled guts of the hosts, Chinese Taipei, and the WBSC’s inability to run a flawless event.
Normal games, normal officiating,
and a normal schedule?
As time went on, the WBSC’s lack of preparation for the tournament was evident in its failure to prepare for Taiwan’s summer weather for the second year in a row. Last year’s U-23 tournament, held in the same location, was also disrupted by heavy rain in Taipei City. If they had known that, they should have prepared an alternate venue and an alternate field in case of rain in Taiwan, where there is a professional baseball team, and if that wasn’t possible, they should have consulted the weather forecast and set aside two or three backup days. In fact, in Japan, if a tournament is held during the rainy season or when a typhoon is about to make landfall, the tournament is held with sufficient backup days. This was the case in Miyazaki in 2018.
However, when a typhoon was forecast, the WBSC did nothing to prevent the event from going ahead. This shows how poorly the organization handled the situation. They even tried to stick to the Taiwan schedule. Other countries, on the other hand, were content to sit on the sidelines, whether they were playing a doubleheader or not.
Add to this the “referee’s arrival” issue that seems to follow every Taiwanese tournament like a tail. The national team had already committed a bizarre error at the 2016 Asian Championships in Taiwan, when the first baseman called a save on the last out of an extra-inning game against Chinese Taipei, which amounted to a “cheating” call. Worse, the umpire who made the call admitted to the error the next day, and the team ended up losing a game they could have won and finishing with a bronze medal. However, even the team that made it to the final didn’t come home with the title.
This time around, the situation is similar. There have been several reports of “misbehavior” by the referee assigned to each national team game. In the case of the Taiwan game alone, some people said, “In all fairness, the 6-1 score was not deserved.” In the Mexico match, there was also a backstory of a player who cried at the calls throughout the match and eventually won a squeeze win with a “frog squeeze bunt” by Choi Hyun-min (Chung Am-go). The fact that this kind of officiating is so common in Taiwan that it doesn’t even happen in Japan should raise suspicions.
What’s even more bizarre is that even in Taipei, which is hosting the tournament alongside Taichung City, there is only one baseball stadium, Tianmu Stadium. If Taipei was also rained out, the worst-case scenario would have been a “lottery” to determine the winner.
This is the current state of the WBSC’s efforts to organize world championships and promote baseball and softball around the world. The WBSC has been around for a long time, but there are still many gaps in the organization.