The Netherlands proved to be too strong for Great Britain on the final day of the 2007 European Baseball Championship, as the Dutch team booked its place at the 2008 Beijing Olympics with a 6-1 victory.<\/p>\n
The tournament schedule could not have worked any better as the two teams took to the field in Barcelona knowing that the winner would be crowned champions of Europe. Team GB entered the game determined to make amends for a sloppy defeat to Germany the day before, but their bats were kept quiet by some formidable Dutch pitching. Starter David Bergman was perfect through 6.2 innings except for walking the second batter he faced (first baseman McQueary-Ennis, who was subsequently out on a double play). Bergman recorded six strikeouts and on the few occasions when the Brits made good contact, they couldn’t avoid the faultless Dutch fielders. By the time shortstop Brant Ust broke up Bergman’s attempt at a no-hitter with two outs in the seventh, the Netherlands had taken control of the game.<\/p>\n
Great Britain’s starting pitcher Brian Essery gave up a run in each of the first three innings, the third run of which came from a Rogearvin Bernadina home run to right-centre field. The Dutch centre-fielder was the stand out player, scoring three runs and hitting a lead-off double in the first that set the tone for the day. Three insurance runs were tacked on in the bottom of the seventh to double the Dutch advantage, although the extra breathing space was ultimately not needed. While the Brits would not go down without a fight, a ninth inning rally only brought a solitary run which was too little, too late. The travelling Orange Army were singing in the stands when Darren Heath, who impressed during the tournament with his fielding in centre field, grounded out to the second baseman to bring the game to a close.<\/p>\n
The Netherlands were worthy winners of the game and the tournament as a whole. Everyone expected that they would seal their Olympic qualification this week and they have done so. Attention now turns to the second and third-placed spots. These two teams will head to Taiwan next spring with another chance of realising their Olympic dreams. Britain should be one of the two teams, although we can’t celebrate just yet! If Spain lose their final game against Sweden then GB and Germany will go to Taiwan. If Spain win (which, with all due respect to Sweden, is very likely) all three teams will finish with the same 3-2 record. It looks like Germany will probably be the team to miss out on account of their loss to Spain, but that is still to be confirmed. Great Britain have certainly done us proud and deserve another shot at making it to Beijing 2008<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Netherlands proved to be too strong for Great Britain on the final day of the 2007 European Baseball Championship, as the Dutch team booked its place at the 2008 Beijing Olympics with a 6-1 victory. The tournament schedule could not have worked any better as the two teams took to the field in Barcelona […]<\/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-229","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\/229","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=229"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4389,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions\/4389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}