![]() Trout grimaced after his futile swing, his 12th strikeout of a tournament in which he hit. He went back to a offspeed option, a slider. Ohtani stepped off the mound and blew on his pitching hand. A 101.6 offering, the fastest of Ohtani's 15 pitches, was low and way outside. Another fastball sailed outside and Trout missed a 99.8 mph pitch over the middle. Ohtani started with a slider low, then got Trout to swing through a 100 mph fastball. “I can’t even imagine being in that moment, the two best players on the planet locking horns as teammates in that spot.” “I saw him take a big deep breath to try and control his emotions,” DeRosa said. captain, a 10-time All-Star and a three-time MVP. He walked big league batting champion Jeff McNeil to begin the ninth, then got six-time All-Star Mookie Betts to ground into a double play. He returned to the dugout and beat out an infield single in the seventh before again walking down the left-field line to Japan’s bullpen and warming up for his third mound appearance of the tournament. Ohtani was Japan's designated hitter and first went to the bullpen ahead of the sixth inning. Kyle Schwarber pulled the Americans within a run when he went deep in the eighth off Yu Darvish. Okamoto boosted the lead in the fourth when he sent a flat slider from Kyle Freeland over the wall in left-center for another solo homer. Japan loaded the bases and Lars Nootbaar, the first non-Japanese-born player to appear for the Samurai Warriors, followed with a run-scoring groundout off Aaron Loup for a 2-1 lead. Munetaka Murakami tied the score on the first pitch of the bottom half off Merrill Kelly (0-1) driving an up fastball 432 feet into the right-field upper deck, a 115.1 mph bullet. ahead in the second against Shota Imanaga (1-0) with his fifth home run of the tournament, tying the WBC record set by South Korea’s Seung Yuop Lee in 2006. No other nation has won the title more than once. The Samurai Warriors went 7-0 and outscored opponents 56-18, reaching the final for the first time since winning the first two WBCs in 20. Japan then joined the Dominican Republic in 2013 as the only unbeaten champions of baseball’s premier national team tournament. For one day, let’s throw away our admiration for them and just think about winning.” We came here to surpass them, to reach the top. "If you admire them, you can’t surpass them. “Let’s stop admiring them," he said, according to a Los Angeles Times translation of the video posted on the website Samurai Japan. Ohtani had given a pregame pep talk in Japan's clubhouse. “I just would have liked to have seen Mike hit a 500-foot homer,” he said. ![]() manager Mark DeRosa savored the matchup - except for the ending. “I thought it was like a Manga,” he said through an interpreter, referring to a Japanese comic book. ![]() Watching the eighth and ninth innings unfold, Japan first baseman Kazuma Okamoto was in disbelief.
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