South Florida Baseball Fans, Prepare to Go Dutch
You probably aren't a huge fan of the Dominican Republic baseball team. I know because you wouldn't be reading this--your eyes would still be far too teary to stare at a blog.
ESPN is reporting that hundreds of D.R. fans had already purchased plane tickets to Miami and tickets to the second round of the World Baseball Classic. It wasn't a question of if David Ortiz, Pedro Martinez, Robinson Cano, Miguel Tejada, and the rest of the loaded WBC favorites would beat The Netherlands, it was a matter of how bad the slaughter would be.
To put it in perspective, the D.R. has 23 current major league players who will make a combined 83.4 million dollars this year. The Netherlands has two players currently in the major leagues (if you can guess the big leaguers on this roster, you win...something), and they'll make a combined .4 million.
After the Dutch upset the D.R. this weekend, the baseball world was shocked and the Dominican players said they were ashamed. Oddly enough, before last night's game in Puerto Rico, experts gave the Netherlands an even smaller chance at doing it twice. (They wouldn't catch the mighty D.R. players off-guard a second time, the logic went.)
And sure enough, the D.R. was ready. But so was Holland. Video after the jump.
The game was unbelievable. The amazing scoreless defensive struggle (sounds boring; it was anything but), lasted until the top of the 11th inning, when Holland's Eugene Kingsdale made a fielding error that allowed Jose Reyes to score--putting the Domincan Republic ahead 1-0.
In the bottom of the 11th, it was Kingsdale who scored the winning run, getting from third to home on a line drive Dominican first baseman Willy Aybar couldn't field cleanly.
The game was the highlight of the night on SportsCenter:
A few local Craigslist users have even been billing WBC tickets as a chance to watch the Domincan Republic. Oops.
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