In the end, there was no miracle. Our national team, which participated in the World Baseball Classic, won the last game against China by a large margin, but ended up finishing third in the group and suffered the humiliation of being eliminated in the first round of three consecutive tournaments.
This is reporter Seonghoon Lee from Tokyo.
<Reporter>
The fate of Korean baseball was decided before even starting the final match against China.
In the previous game, the Czech Republic had to win by giving more than four points to Australia to advance to the quarterfinals, but the Czech Republic, which was our last hope, lost 8-3 by conceding a large number of goals at the end of the game.예스벳 토토
Australia, who had 3 wins and 1 loss, confirmed their advance to the quarterfinals by finishing second in the group following Japan, who won all four matches, and Korean baseball was eliminated in the first round of three consecutive WBC tournaments following 2013 and 2017.
After watching the match between Australia and the Czech Republic at the lodging, our players arrived at the Tokyo Dome and took part in the meaningless match against China with sad expressions on their faces.
The national team scored 8 points in the 3rd inning by shaking the opponent’s poor defense with active base running and surprise bunts, followed by 6 points in the 4th inning with Park Gun-woo’s grand-base home run, and 4 points in the 5th inning with Kim Ha-sung’s third home run in the tournament. This 22-2, 5th cold game victory was won, 2 wins, 2 losses, and the tournament ended in 3rd place.
[Lee Kang-cheol/WBC national team coach: I sincerely thank the fans who came to the baseball field today even though the decision was made to drop out, and I sincerely apologize to the people and baseball fans in Korea.]
The players will return home tomorrow (14th) and return to their respective teams.
Amidst the shock, the journey of Korean baseball in this tournament came to an early end.
In order to restore honor, serious research on the trend of world baseball and painstaking efforts are desperately needed.