Venezuela wins the World Baseball Classic and it was impossible not to feel every second of it
Venezuela beat Team USA 3-2 on Tuesday night at loanDepot Park in Miami and won the first World Baseball Classic title in their country’s history. The most storied baseball nation to have never won this tournament finally got there and nobody who watched that ninth inning is going to forget it anytime soon.
Eugenio Suárez. Runner on second. Game tied at two. Ninth inning. Garrett Whitlock hung a changeup and Suárez put it in the left-center gap. Javier Sanoja scored. The Venezuelan dugout was already on the field.
Suárez hit second base, spread his arms out wide, looked straight up at the loanDepot Park roof, and stayed there for three seconds just screaming at the sky while thirty-three million people lost their minds simultaneously.
Eugenio Suárez gives Venezuela the lead in the 9th
That is one of the better baseball moments this tournament has ever produced and it happened in the finals against our guys, Team USA. Brutal.
Venezuela has been the most accomplished baseball country to never win this thing. Five tournaments. No finals appearances until tonight.
The gut-punch that lives deepest was 2023 when Trea Turner hit a grand slam in the eighth inning to rip a championship out of their hands when they were six outs away.
This entire team carried that to Miami and made sure it did not happen again.
Eduardo Rodriguez was the story nobody saw coming. Pablo López withdrew with an injury. Jesús Luzardo stayed in Clearwater to protect his new $135 million extension with the Phillies.
Rodriguez stepped in as a replacement starter and threw 4⅓ innings of one-run ball against a lineup that was supposed to eat him alive. Ninety-three mph fastball. Eighty-nine mph cutter. Spotless command.
Venezuelan starters had a 6.89 ERA in this tournament entering Tuesday night. Rodriguez did not care about that number. He threw the best game of his WBC career when Venezuela needed him to deliver one.
Venezuela built a 2-0 lead on a third inning sac fly and a Wilyer Abreu solo shot to dead center in the fifth and their bullpen protected it for most of the night. Then the eighth inning happened. Bobby Witt Jr. walked.
Bryce Harper stepped in with two outs and turned on a middle-middle changeup and sent it over the center field fence to tie it. A Hall of Famer doing Hall of Famer things in the biggest moment of the tournament.
That shot deserved to win a championship. It just did not.
Bryce Harper. Massive Game-Tying 2-Run HR
The offense is the part that stings the most. Team USA had two runs. Two. The best lineup assembled in this tournament managed two runs in the championship game against a Venezuelan pitching staff that came in with one of the worst ERAs in the field.
The bats went quiet when it mattered most and that is on the players and on Mark DeRosa. You cannot score two runs and expect to win the World Baseball Classic.
When Palencia struck out the last batter to end it, Suárez hit the field on his knees with a Venezuelan flag over his shoulders and started crying. The whole team was crying. The whole stadium was crying.
Then they got on the podium and sang their national anthem at full volume like they were trying to reach Caracas without a phone. It was genuinely one of the more emotional championship scenes you will see in baseball.
Congrats to Team Venezuela. Hell of a tournament.
We have to give it to them. They earned it. Venezuela played with fire, and won the whole thing when nobody thought they were good enough to do it.
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