Turner, Goldschmidt propel U.S. into WBC final
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Jeff PassanESPN
MIAMI — At the bottom of the billion-dollar lineup that sent Team USA to the finals of the World Baseball Classic with a 14-2 thumping of Cuba on Sunday night resides the most dangerous No. 9 hitter anyone around baseball can remember. Trea Turner, to be clear, is not anyone’s idea of a ninth-place hitter, but then the American lineup is not any ordinary squad of hitters, either.
The shellacking that the United States put on Cuba in front of a highly charged, sold-out crowd of 35,779 at LoanDepot Park concluded a wild 24 hours in which Turner hit a tournament-saving grand slam to beat Venezuela in the quarterfinals and followed with two more home runs in Sunday’s semifinals. The U.S. will face the winner of Japan and Mexico, which plays here at 7 p.m. ET on Monday.
On a night when chants of “Libertad!” rang throughout the stadium intermittently and three protestors ran onto the field to great applause from the crowd, the U.S. dismantled a Cuban team whose appearance in the semifinals exceeded pretournament expectations. While Japan remains the favorite, the Team USA that showed up Sunday looked like even more of a juggernaut than it did in 2017, when it won the title. That team didn’t have Turner, let alone Mookie Betts or Mike Trout, who occupy this lineup’s top two spots. Add Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado, Kyle Schwarber and Will Smith, Pete Alonso and Tim Anderson and the potential for pitchers to find themselves as confounded as Cuba’s is acute.
“I have to pinch myself all the time realizing this lineup is just — I’ve never seen anything like it,” U.S. starter Adam Wainwright told ESPN after allowing one run over four innings in the win. “Has there ever been a better one? Probably not.”
Turner is not the sort to render an opinion on such things. He is famously steady and unfussy, and amid the celebrations in the U.S. dugout of his feats, Turner tried his best to remain entirely stoic. On his first swing following the eighth-inning grand slam that pushed the U.S. past previously undefeated Venezuela, Turner hammered a second-inning solo home run that staked the U.S. to a 3-1 lead against Cuba. Turner’s three-run blast in the sixth turned a game teetering on the precipice of a blowout into an undoubted one, putting Team USA ahead 12-2.
Up and down the lineup, American stars shone. Betts went 3-for-6 and scored twice. Arenado was 2-for-3 with two runs before leaving the game after being hit by a pitch. (He told ESPN he will play in the final.) Cedric Mullins homered to account for the final run. Goldschmidt, whose two-run home run in the first gave the U.S. a lead it never relinquished, had a pair of hits and drove in four runs.
“That was one of my favorite home runs I’ve ever hit in my entire life,” said Goldschmidt, who, along with the rest of the U.S. players, marveled at the atmosphere at LoanDepot Park, where Cuba was playing for the first time.
Turner’s line was best of all: 3-for-5 with four RBIs to give him a tournament-best 10. Turner also set a U.S. record for home runs in a WBC (four) and tied the mark for home runs in a WBC game with Ken Griffey Jr., who is serving as Team USA’s hitting coach.
“Just can’t wait to tell him,” Turner said.
After signing an 11-year, $300 million contract with the Philadelphia Phillies over the winter, the 29-year-old Turner spent the past four WBC games — all U.S. wins — hitting ninth. Mark DeRosa said he considered moving Turner from the No. 9 hole to sixth for the Cuba game, but the manager explained, “There’s a flow to the lineup right now that I didn’t want to mess with. He seems fine with it.”
Turner, truthfully, is fine with just about anything. He ripped his batting glove and chucked it right in the garbage, neither overly sentimental nor particularly superstitious. When Schwarber, his Phillies teammate, emerged from the clubhouse, rolled his eyes and said toward Turner, “We get it. You hit two homers and a grand slam,” Turner chuckled at the good-natured ribbing. Pragmatism might be Turner’s most obvious quality — aside perhaps from the sneaky power and elite speed that make him one of the best players in baseball.
“I don’t do a lot of emotion,” Turner told ESPN. “Just because you hit a homer one at-bat doesn’t mean you’re going to do anything the next time. So compartmentalize, and when the day’s over, you kind of take a step back, see what happened and then move on from there.”
What Turner sees when he takes a step back is a lineup currently on contracts worth well over $1.5 billion. “I know I got really good guys behind me,” he said. “Mookie, Mike, Paul, Nolan … “
Cuba, for the first time fielding a team in an international tournament with players from Major League Baseball, got tired of that U.S. lineup quickly after its own hot start riled up a crowd filled with supporters of the team if not its government. Three infield singles off Wainwright loaded the bases with no outs and an Alfredo Despaigne walk gave Cuba a 1-0 lead. Wainwright wriggled out of the jam and didn’t look back before giving way to his St. Louis Cardinals teammate Miles Mikolas, who followed with four more innings, working around trouble to allow only a run-scoring Andy Ibanez single in the fifth.
Team USA will take Monday off and watch the game between its potential opponents. Japan will start its flamethrowing 21-year-old phenom Roki Sasaki and also plans to throw Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who has won the Sawamura Award — Japan’s equivalent of the Cy Young — each of the past two seasons. If Japan grabs a comfortable lead, Yamamoto could be saved for Team USA. Mexico, which handed the U.S. its only WBC loss and beat a game Puerto Rico team in the quarterfinals, will start Los Angeles Angels left-hander Patrick Sandoval.
After winning the first two WBCs, in 2006 and 2009, Japan lost in the semifinals in 2013 and 2017, the latter to the U.S. team that won the tournament. This is the first time Mexico has made the final four of the tourney.
ARLINGTON, Texas — Boston Red Sox designated hitter Rafael Devers became the first major leaguer to strike out 12 times in a season’s first four games.
Devers went 0-for-4 with two more strikeouts Sunday in Boston’s 3-2 loss to the Texas Rangers.
Devers’ latest mark for futility came a day after he became the first big leaguer to be fanned 10 times in the first three games of a season.
He’s 0-for-16, though he did draw a two-out walk in the ninth Sunday to keep the inning alive and put the potential tying run in scoring position.
The 12 strikeouts broke the previous record of 11 in the first four games, which had been done four times previously since 1901, according to SportRadar.
Brent Rooker of the Athletics struck out 11 times to open last season. The others were Atlanta’s Ronald Acuña Jr. in 2020, Minnesota’s Byron Buxton in 2017 and Houston’s Brett Wallace in 2013.
Devers is now solely the Red Sox DH after their offseason acquisition of third baseman Alex Bregman.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The two teams suing NASCAR over antitrust allegations said Wednesday in a filing that a countersuit against 23XI Racing, Front Row Motorsports and Michael Jordan’s manager is “an act of desperation” and asked that it be dismissed.
NASCAR’s countersuit contends that Jordan business manager Curtis Polk “willfully” violated antitrust laws by orchestrating anticompetitive collective conduct in connection with the most recent charter agreements.
23XI and Front Row were the only two organizations out of 15 that refused to sign the new agreements, which were presented to the teams last September in a take-it-or-leave-it offer 48 hours before the start of NASCAR’s playoffs.
The charters were fought for by the teams ahead of the 2016 season and twice have been extended. The latest extension is for seven years to match the current media rights deal and guarantee 36 of the 40 spots in each week’s field to the teams that hold the charters, as well as other financial incentives. 23XI — co-owned by Jordan — and Front Row refused to sign and sued, alleging NASCAR and the France family that owns the stock car series are a monopoly.
Wednesday’s filing claims that NASCAR’s counterclaim is “retaliatory” and “does not allege the facts necessary to state a claim.”
“NASCAR is using the counterclaim to engage in litigation gamesmanship, with the transparent objective of intimidating the other racing teams by threatening them with severe consequences if they support Plaintiffs’ challenge to the unlawful NASCAR monopoly,” the response says.
23XI and Front Row have requested NASCAR’s counterclaim be dismissed because it “fails at the threshold because it does not allege facts plausibly showing a contract, combination or conspiracy in restraint of trade.
“The counterclaim allegations instead show each racing team individually determining whether or not to agree to NASCAR’s demands through individual negotiations — the opposite of a conspiracy.”
The filing also defends Polk, who was specifically targeted in NASCAR’s counterclaim as the mastermind of the contentious two-year battle between the teams and the stock car series. NASCAR claimed in its countersuit that Polk threatened a team boycott of Daytona 500 qualifying races, but the teams argued Wednesday “there is no allegation that such a threatened boycott of qualifying races ever took place.”
“None of NASCAR’s factual claims fit into the very narrow categories of blatantly anti-competitive agreements that courts summarily condemn as per se unlawful,” the teams said.
Jordan, through a spokesperson, sent word to The Associated Press that Polk speaks for him and the NBA icon views any attack on Polk as “personal.”
NASCAR’s attorney has warned that a consequence of the 23XI and Front Row lawsuit could lead to the abolishment of the charter system outright — NASCAR argues it would be a consequence and not what NASCAR actually wants to do — and that 23XI first made this personal by naming NASCAR chairman Jim France in the original antitrust lawsuit.
The teams struck back at the threat to eliminate the charter system in Wednesday’s filing. It alleges it is an empty threat meant to scare the 13 organizations that did sign the charter agreements.
The claim also says Front Row should be dismissed from NASCAR’s countersuit because “NASCAR does not allege any specific conduct by Front Row or its owners or employees to support a claim that it participated in the alleged conspiracy.”
“The other allegations in the counterclaim against Front Row are all entirely conclusory or improper group pleading that seeks to lump in Front Row with 23XI Racing, Mr. Polk, and “others,” while never identifying what — if anything — Front Row Motorsports itself has done to purportedly participate in the alleged conspiracy.”
There is no deadline for a judge’s decision.
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