Great Britain saw their winning streak come to an end today in their penultimate game of the 2007 European Baseball Tournament. The Brits entered their match-up with Germany holding a 3-0 record in the final group stage, but a late fightback resulted in a 7-5 loss, dealing a blow to their chances of winning the competition and gaining automatic entry to the 2008 Olympics.<\/p>\n
\nGermany played well and capitalised on their chances; however the British side will be ruing the fact that they created the chances for their opponent. The seventh inning was a killer. A series of mistakes let the Germans score two runs to take a 5-4 lead. After a nice pick-up and throw by third baseman Timothy Collins, GB catcher Mike Nickeas simply lost the ball somehow (his vision was possibly hindered by the base runner, although the camera angle didn’t offer a great view of the incident) and a sure-out at home plate turned into a run. Another out was squandered soon after when what looked to be a regulation put-out at first came to nothing as first baseman Ian Young didn’t keep his foot on the bag. They were heartbreaking mistakes in the field; silly errors on plays which they would normally make 99 times out of 100.<\/p>\n
The Brits rallied in the bottom of the seventh and Nickeas made amends for his error at the plate by driving in shortstop Brant Ust to tie the game 5-5. Hopes that the momentum had swung back in GB’s favour were reinforced by the pitching of Stephen Spragg in the top of the eighth inning. The righty side-arm pitcher had good movement on his pitches and was able to strike out both of the first two batters. But Spragg was occasionally having trouble with his control and things started to fall apart when he hit a batter and then walked the next. As every baseball fan knows, handing out free passes when you’ve recorded two outs always come back to bite you, and so it did. A pitching change (in which DH Aeden McQueary-Ennis took over on the mound) failed to halt the slide and Germany were able to score two runs to take a decisive lead. With German relief pitcher Enorbel Marquez throwing strikes, the British batters were unable to respond and had to accept a tough loss.<\/p>\n
Despite this disappointment, Britain are still in a good position. Spain (2-1) and the Netherlands (3-0) are playing this evening and, whatever the result, GB will enter the final day tomorrow with a chance to win the tournament. The Brits will face the Netherlands at 10.00 (BST), while Spain face the outsiders Sweden. It’s going to be a tough ask, but the fact that Team GB are in this position is a great achievement in itself. Let’s hope they can bounce back from this defeat and finish the tournament with a bang.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Great Britain saw their winning streak come to an end today in their penultimate game of the 2007 European Baseball Tournament. The Brits entered their match-up with Germany holding a 3-0 record in the final group stage, but a late fightback resulted in a 7-5 loss, dealing a blow to their chances of winning the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,21],"tags":[72],"class_list":["post-227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-baseball-2","category-international-baseball-2","tag-european-championship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=227"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4390,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227\/revisions\/4390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}