Luis Urías Had a Massive Moment and Novena México Earned Respect, Even In Defeat

A great baseball game needs a sense of rising action. In a perfect world, you’d get the savor and soupçon of a pitching duel between two dominant yet disparate starters, and on Monday night, we lived in a perfect baseball world. Roki Sasaki shut down Novena México the first time through the order, shredding them with fastballs over 100 miles per hour and a splitter that moved like a slider at 92. Patrick Sandoval held serve, though, with his slider-heavy left-handed attack stifling the left-leaning Samurai Japan lineup. 

The very best games, though, don’t demand of their audiences the exhausting patience and tenacity of attention required to appreciate a 1-0 or 2-1 battle. At some middle stage, the tension breaks, and an early blow is struck. In Monday night’s contest, two Brewers fueled that much-needed change of pace. 

Baseball is a lot like life–just not in the way you were told when you were a kid. It’s a game of earning big moments by winning the small ones, and then of winning the big moments by keeping things small. If you seize your opportunity more often than you let it slip by, you’ll win most of the time. Seizing that opportunity depends on raw ability, but also on being prepared and staying in balance.

Sometimes, you put a down payment on some good luck by suffering some bad. In the second inning, Rowdy Tellez had scorched a ground ball against Sasaki, but because he hit it nearly straight down and nearly straight into the shifted defense, it was a groundout. In the fourth, though, he hit a meager trickler, a ground ball down the third-base line that would have been an easy out, but for that very same shifted infield. It wasn’t just that Tellez got lucky, though. He fought that ball off. He put it in play, something three of the first 12 batters Sasaki had faced had failed to do, and he got a single out of it.

Isaac Paredes did much the same, although with a blooper instead of a grounder, and that brought up Luis Urias. He’d already managed a single against Sasaki, in the second inning, but it had been a cousin of Tellez’s, not a sharp line drive. He was hanging in against stuff that clearly had him nearly overwhelmed, and the baseball gods smiled on him. After falling behind 0-2 on a blazing fastball and a bad whiff against the splitter, he’d laid off one more splitter and fouled off another two with emergency swings. When Sasaki went back to the top of the zone with a fastball, Urías hit it back at him for an infield single.

In the fourth, Urías was ready for the first-pitch fastball, but he fouled it away. He knew Sasaki would use that pitch to set up the splitter, and when Sasaki executes that pitch, it doesn’t matter that much if the hitter knows it. The important thing was, Sasaki didn’t execute it, and Urías–not overswinging, staying on the ball even though it was 10 miles per hour slower than its predecessor and way out on the outside edge of the plate–didn’t miss his opportunity.

IT'S GONE!! Luis Urias 3-run shot 💪🇲🇽

📺: WBC on FS1 pic.twitter.com/FUTLyWKdnU

— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) March 21, 2023

That didn’t turn out to be enough, of course. In the seventh inning, Japan struck back, with an equally impressive home run from an equally exciting young MLB star, Masataka Yoshida. Along the way, both teams did miss some opportunities, but both teams’ pitching depth cracked slightly–just enough to create more opportunities. Randy Arozarena stole a home run in the fifth, and after the tying homer by Yoshida in the seventh, he led off the eighth with a double that required a bit of a miscalculation by the right fielder, setting up a two-run rally that vaulted México back into the lead. 

The edge could have been made even bigger, but Tellez couldn’t quite manage the same trick that served him so well throughout the tournament to that point. He struck out with a runner on third and one out, a pivotal moment in the game. After taking a called second strike that he thought was low, he bravely took the next pitch, a diving splitter that many hitters would have chased after the same set-up. Like life, though, baseball sometimes forces you to pass the same test more than once, and Tellez whiffed on another splitter on the next pitch.

Therein lies the beauty of the game, and of life, and it’s not by any coincidence that the cruelty of both lives right in the hip pocket of that beauty. Tellez had one chance, and missed it. Paredes picked him up by smacking a single to drive in the runner he stranded there, but Yoshida threw out the trailing runner at the plate, stopping the scoring and ending the inning. Though Urías got another plate appearance to lead off the ninth, the Brewers duo was done having chances to alter the game, and Samurai Japan finished a comeback with great, relentless offense in the eighth and ninth frames. 

If the Brewers can’t learn much from Urías and Tellez, as they come back with stories of the games and the moments they just experienced with Novena México, they don’t deserve to win anything this year. In all likelihood, though, they’ll be able to glean plenty, and the performances of those two guys during the six-game run México managed also prove that the Brewers can trust them both to win those small moments and stay small enough to come up big when the big moments come.