WBC news and notes, Q&A with Team Netherlands, Robinson Can check-in: Touching Base

Publish date: 2024-05-09

Touching Base is a monthly column highlighting the exciting happenings in baseball beyond the borders of MLB — from international leagues to amateur teams and everything in between. This month’s column features a Q&A with Team Netherlands manager Hensley Meulens, some recommended reading on baseball abroad and a few of the recent ins and outs on the World Baseball Classic rosters.

Robinson Canó stood on deck at Estadio La Rinconada in Venezuela earlier this month and ate a heckling from the home fans.

The longtime Yankees and Mariners second baseman was a hired hand with Tigres del Licey in the Caribbean Series, the same team that knocked out his own squad, Estrellas Orientales, in January’s Dominican League final. And now he, and the Tigres, were a win away from a record 11th Caribbean title, but on belligerent grounds.

Canó, now 40 years old with 17 major-league seasons behind him and a legend still growing, never turned around to face his hecklers. He spun his bat like Iceman with a pen in “Top Gun” and carried on.

De todo le gritan a Robinson Canó desde las gradas del Estadio Monumental de Caracas 🗣️ pic.twitter.com/moNSZHyorV

— Séptima Entrada (@septimaentrada_) February 11, 2023

Canó may have lost a step or three — he hit just .150 last season over 104 plate appearances between stops with the Mets, Padres and Braves — but he has not lost his cool.

His vibe is valuable. That’s why, it seems, Canó will be part of a stacked Dominican Republic roster when the World Baseball Classic starts in March. He’s without a job in Major League Baseball, but he’s not without purpose.

“I was born ready,” Canó told a hoard of reporters on the field in Venezuela after Tigres took down host Leones del Caracas in the 65th Caribbean Series’ “Gran Final.” With Canó at second base, Licey became the most celebrated team among the Caribbean Professional Baseball Confederation, the league of leagues that oversees the historic series.

It seems Canó will play out his days as a kind of mercenary veteran infielder. He was twice suspended by MLB for positive tests of performance-enhancing drugs, first for 80 games in 2018 with the Mariners, then for all of the 2021 season while with the Mets. He is an eight-time All-Star, a World Series winner (in 2009 with the Yankees), a two-time Silver Slugger and a Home Run Derby champ, all of which probably put him, before those two suspensions, on track for significant Hall of Fame consideration.

He was a plus-side value add as recently as 2020, when he hit .316 with a 143 OPS+, according to Baseball Reference (43 percent better than league average). His 2022 season, though, saw a significant dip. He bounced between three teams last year in no small part because the Mets were paying most of his remaining salary. Canó is still due $24 million this year, the final leg of a 10-year, $240 million deal he originally signed with the Mariners before the 2014 season.

“He is not the same player as he was in the past,” Licey manager José Offerman said before the Caribbean Series, “but he still is an above-average defender.”

In 2013, Canó was named WBC MVP after going 15-for-32 at the plate, leading the Dominican to an undefeated run for the title. Next month’s WBC, Canó’s fourth, will allow him to showcase his skill for one final shot in the majors – or serve as his farewell tour. The Dominican Republic opens the tournament on March 11 in Miami against Venezuela.

Quick Q&A

Hensley Meulens, WBC manager of Team Netherlands and Colorado Rockies hitting coach

“Bam Bam” Meulens won three World Series titles during his time as hitting coach with the Giants from 2010-19. He was the first player born in Curaçao to play in the major leagues. He speaks five languages, including Papiamento, a creole dialect spoken in the Caribbean. He was even knighted by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands in 2012.

And next month, Meulens will manage the Netherlands in the World Baseball Classic, his third time leading the Dutch in the WBC. Meulens has plenty of insight into the tourney – the keys to taking advantage of a short tournament, getting a team ready to win and why he’s sick of hearing that the Netherlands is a “Cinderella” team.

He spoke with The Athletic last week from Arizona, where he’s spending the first half of spring as the Rockies’ hitting coach before flying to Taiwan for the start of the WBC.

Q&A lightly edited for length and clarity.

What’s most difficult about managing in the WBC?

First of all, it’s to get everybody who’s eligible to play on the team. And you don’t always get all of them. We don’t have all our big-league players. We’re missing three: Kenley Jansen (Red Sox), Ozzie Albies (Braves) and Ceddanne Rafaela (Red Sox minor leagues). When that happens, you find independent guys, amateur guys, whoever you can to play on the team. Even so, in the past, we found a way to compete every time. In 2006, we threw a no-hitter (18-year-old Shairon Martis against Panama). It’s still the only no-hitter in WBC history. In 2009, we beat the Dominican twice and eliminated them. And the last two WBCs, we got to the semifinals. We always compete. We manage to pitch very well even though we don’t have a lot of major-league pitching. And we hit the crap out of the ball in 2017. I expect some of the same things. It’s all about getting the team to come together.

We’ve been waiting six years for this one. We better be ready.

It’s an odd tournament. Single games, no series. Pitchers will be limited. What’s the key to winning a tournament like this?

We try to win every inning. Every game is do-or-die. There is no tomorrow. You want to win the bracket in the first round and face whoever you can in the quarterfinals. More than likely, that will be Japan or Korea when we advance to Tokyo. And Japan is the strongest. We’ve beaten Korea twice, in 2013 and 2017. But if we’re gonna win, we have to beat everybody. That’s the challenge and that’s how you have to manage.

We played in the semifinals at Dodger Stadium in 2017. There were a lot of emotions flying around and we made some base-running mistakes in the first inning. Andrelton Simmons got caught in a rundown and Jurickson Profar stepped off the base at first and got tagged. And then Wladimir Balentien hit a homer that should have been a grand slam. Instead, it was a two-run homer and we lost by one.

You have to say to yourself, ‘What are we gonna do to not give up runs?’ You have to make those tough decisions. I benched Xander Bogaerts because he wasn’t swinging well. And that woke him up.

Who are you most excited to see in the tournament?

Cuba is allowing some of their big-league guys to play. It would have been great to see them all play, but it’ll be great to see Luis Robert and Yoán Moncada (both White Sox) playing for Cuba.

Curaçao played well in the Caribbean Series. What do you think of Netherlands’ chances in the WBC?

Every time we advance, we’re a “Cinderella.” We’re doing something right, right? So why are we a Cinderella? We’ve shown three times we can beat the biggest countries. We eliminated Cuba. We eliminated Korea. We eliminated the Dominican; we beat them twice, with Big Papi (David Ortiz) in the lineup and Pedro (Martínez) pitching. We beat that team. I mean, c’mon. You have to give our guys credit.

We’ve been in the Top 10 in the world for 20 years. That’s something for a country that’s known as a soccer country. Curaçao has a population of 100,000-something, but we keep producing players. We have six players from the majors. There’s talent floating around the island and in the Netherlands. We’ll have Bogaerts (Padres), Profar (free agent), Jonathan Schoop (Tigers), and Chadwick Tromp (Braves). We have Roger Bernadina at 38, Balentien at 38 and the Palacios brothers, Richie (Guardians) and Josh (Pirates minor leagues). We have guys who can play.

But that plane coming from Amsterdam, our players have to get acclimated right away. They’ve only seen snow this winter.

Just in time for Milan Fashion Week

Tsuyoshi Shinjo, known with affinity among fans in Japan and North America as “Big Boss,” left the Mets in 2003 and returned to Nippon Professional Baseball to play for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters. That fan affection followed him. And last year, he took over as manager of the Fighters.

On Tuesday, Shinjo stepped into another new realm, releasing a preview of the club’s alternate uniform after the Fighters put him in charge of designing its new look.

Here he is modeling the fit:

【球団発表】

／
『NEW AGE GAMES produced by SHINJO』開催⚾️
＼#新庄剛志監督デザインユニフォームを発表.ᐟ
下記日程計5試合で選手たちが着用してプレーします❗️

📅5月13日(土)～18日(木)
🏟ES CON FIELD HOKKAIDO#lovefighters #新時代

※写真は球団提供 pic.twitter.com/eurOKn5lep

— パ・リーグ.com / パーソルパ・リーグTV【公式】 (@PacificleagueTV) February 21, 2023

It’s certainly a choice.

WBC ins and outs

Pitching is taking a hit on WBC rosters even before the first game. As pitchers reported for spring training and their teams mapped out their health and potential progress over the next six weeks, the tournament, for some, became too much.

On Wednesday, right-hander Nick Pivetta, who started a league-high 33 games for the Red Sox last year, withdrew from Canada’s roster, according to Sportsnet. Pivetta, along with Guardians righty Cal Quantrill, was meant to lead Canada’s rotation.

Last week, lefty Clayton Kershaw removed himself from Team USA’s roster. Kershaw, though, said he’s healthy enough. His issue, instead, was securing an insurance policy to cover any potential injury he might suffer in the WBC. He was replaced on the Team USA roster by Padres swingman Nick Martinez.

Yankees lefty Nestor Cortes suffered a right hamstring strain early in camp and took himself off the U.S. roster. Rockies lefty Kyle Freeland took his place.

And Rockies right-hander Germán Márquez, who stood among Venezuela’s best pitchers, dropped out with a right hamstring strain. “I’m sad and disappointed,” Márquez said last week.

How do you say … ?

In Dutch, a pitcher is called a “werper.” It’s pronounced with punch. “Vare-per” with a little roll on the first syllable. On the Netherlands WBC roster, there are several minor-league werpers competing for the No. 1 job, along with 37-year-old former Braves right-hander Jair Jurrjens.

What about the other half of the battery? How do you say catcher in Dutch? It’s “catcher.” Easy enough.

News and Notes

• Seung-hwan Oh carries not one, but two of the best nicknames in baseball’s recent history, known at various times as the “Final Boss” and “Stone Buddha.” And at 40 years old, he’s still kicking. He was the best reliever in KBO history when he joined the Cardinals in 2016 for a four-year stint in MLB. When he returned to his original team, the Samsung Lions, in 2020, Oh became one of the KBO’s best relievers again. And he recently signed another one-year contract with the Lions for the 2023 season.

• Recommended reads this month:

This fascinating story from The New York Times on former Yakuza mobsters who joined a softball league in Japan is certainly worth a read.

Before Olivia Pichardo — the first woman named to an NCAA Division I varsity roster — begins her debut season on Friday, The Athletic’s Kamila Hinkson spoke to four women ballplayers who also achieved notable firsts over the last year.

And this, from MLB.com’s Matt Monagan on former Met (and oldest active pitcher in all of professional baseball) Dae-sung Koo, is an inspiration to old guys everywhere.

• And finally, there was a rare triple play in the Caribbean Series, care of second baseman Dayan Frías of Colombian side Vaqueros de Montería.

Ⓜ️| ¡Que maravilla, Dayan!💎

Joyita Defensiva de nuestro campocorto Dayan Frías, un TRIPLE PLAY ante Leones del Caracas en la Serie del Caribe 2023.

¡Mucha calidad!🤠#SomosColombia | #PorNuestraTierra | 🇨🇴💙Ⓜ️ pic.twitter.com/RTIRgv6V2Y

— Vaqueros de Montería🤠⚾🔥 (@Beisbolvaquero) February 9, 2023

Notice his position in a shift? We won’t see a triple play like that in MLB this year.

(Top photo of Robinson Canó: Mitchell Leff / Getty Images)

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