San Diego Padres closer Mason Miller had his second save for Team USA last night, but it came with some controversy.
Mason Miller once again gave the San Diego Padres a glimpse of what the team’s games may now be like with the reliever as their new closer, and this time the results were a lot more dramatic.
The backdrop: Miller was the last in a line of effective Team USA relievers who shut down the powerful Dominican Republic lineup in one of two semifinal games in the WBC, albeit with some shaky moments. The home run list told the story: third baseman Junior Caminero opened the scoring with a solo shot in the second for the Dominican Republic, and Gunnar Henderson and Roman Anthony countered with a pair of solo home runs to put Team USA up, 2-1 .
That lead somehow stood up until the ninth, when Miller embarked on a very different closing experience from his first WBC save in which he struck out the side. This time he clearly had the spring-training version of his slider, which was all over the place as Miller threw just 13 strikes in 22 pitches.
But the powerful Dominican lineup didn’t exactly beat up Miller, either. Instead, a walk, a wild pitch and a ground ball put the tying run just 90 feet away from scoring with two outs, and Miller ratcheted up the tension by going to a 3-2 count against Geraldo Perdomo, who then struck out on a slider that strike zone graphics clearly showed was below the zone.
The ending showcased a couple of important flaws in the WBC format, with the biggest being the outcry for the ABS challenge system, which is going through a solid trial run in MLB spring training after being used effectively in the minors for multiple seasons.
The other flaw is the timing of the game, which occurs in the middle of spring training when MLB pitchers clearly aren’t at their best. What we saw in last night’s final wasn’t the midseason version of pitchers like Paul Skenes and Miller, nor was it even the April version.
As for Miller, this was the kind of outing that wouldn’t have even occurred in spring training, where the goal is just to get a certain amount of work in as part of a ramp-up process. The WBC interrupts that process and suddenly puts pitchers from multiple international teams into high-leverage situations when they’re clearly not ready yet.
The blown strike will be good conversational fodder for the next few days, with several Dominican Republic players already bemoaning their fate, which conveniently ignores the fact that the “best lineup ever” had six chances to come back and couldn’t push a run across, and they didn’t even get a hit in the ninth. The ABS system will solve this problem next time around, but the Dominican Republic lost this game because they didn’t hit.