HOUSTON — About 40,000 people were in the building Saturday night. It was energy. It was aggressive. It was fun. It was electric. It was a lot. There is no other way around it. You wake up the next morning, and playoff baseball feels light by comparison, both in schedule and energy. I get it. We all get it. But I will tell you this. Team USA did not disappoint. Some of the young players on the field have not disappointed either.
For the second day in a row, a young arm jumped out. First, it was a high school kid, Joseph Contreras. Then, it was a young, Single-A arm from the Virgin Islands named Najer Victor. Both came out with electric stuff.
Contreras broke Aaron Judge’s bat. Victor decided to strike out three of the best hitters of the last decade, and cut them down consecutively, and did not make it look particularly difficult. It was a short look, but it makes you wonder what’s going on in Anaheim. That kid is not in camp.
What struck me most from all the baseball yesterday was not the overall talent on the field. It was the dominance that continues to show itself from the USA club. I have yet to see Mexico, but that’s on the agenda for Sunday. I am excited to see that team before they face the United States on Monday. It will likely be a sold-out game and the most aggressive matchup in Houston.
When you watch these games through a scouting lens, you start to notice different things. You listen to the fans. You watch the approach. From a pure baseball standpoint, Mark DeRosa has done something simple that matters. He is putting players in lineup spots where they are comfortable. Kyle Schwarber is leading off. Not the prototypical leadoff hitter, but the comfort zone there is undeniable, given what he has done the last few years.
Alex Bregman in the natural two spot. Something that oddly became an issue in Houston the last couple of years he was here. Aaron Judge in the three hole. Bryce Harper in the four spot.
And it keeps going. The lineup is balanced. Everything is protected. You have left-right matchups. You have run production. You have speed. Watching a lineup come together that functions the way it is supposed to is impressive.
The game ended up a blowout, but it did not start that way.
Last night I saw Schwarber hit a ball so far I actually lost sight of it. I can count on less than one hand the number of times I have seen a ball hit that far where I simply lost it in flight, especially in a big-league park where the ball is usually easy to track. This one was absolutely destroyed.
I watched Bregman stay on a baseball in a run-production situation and drive the ball to right field. I saw Trace Thompson make a leaping catch at the wall for Great Britain to keep the game tight early. What you begin to see in these games is more and more of the athleticism, electricity, and competition that lives inside this sport. It’s not that it does not exist during the regular season, but when the stage gets bigger, the tools show up in different ways.
From a scouting perspective, you start seeing things that people sometimes walk past during the daily grind. The best players show up. Right now, they are showing up here.
The real challenge will be bottling this feeling. These players will go back to their clubs. They will play all year. They will grind through the season and compete for championships. But moments like this are different.
Tarik Skubal said it best. He admitted he did not expect the emotion of this tournament to hit the way it did. It made him talk with his agent and his team about whether he should stay in the tournament. Those are big decisions.
You have a chance to win a medal here. You have a chance to compete on a stage that can feel like it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Because it might be.
‘Emotional’ might actually be the nicest way to describe it.
Day 3 on deck.
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