Edwin Díaz's Injury Fallout and the Top Takeaways from World Baseball Classic So Far

It may feel like it only just began, but the World Baseball Classic is already nearly over. All that's left are two quarterfinal games, the semifinals and the championship.

This makes now a good time to assess what things we can take away from the latest rendition of the WBC, be they good or, well, less good.

There are eight things that we really want to talk about. They concern individual players and teams, as well as more overarching storylines that demand discussion. Like, for example, what can (and can't) be learned from Edwin Díaz's heartbreaking knee injury.

Let's hit 'em one at a time, starting with a guy whose big-game bona fides just continue to get more impressive.

Just give Randy Arozarena the spotlight. He'll know what to do next.

Simple instructions, perhaps, but valid enough just in light of what Arozarena has done in the playoffs. He broke basically every postseason record in 2020, and on the whole he's hit .347/.426/.733 with 11 home runs in 26 October appearances as a Tampa Bay Ray.

If there was ever any doubt that "Playoff Randy" would also show up in the WBC, it ought to be gone by now. All the Cuba native-turned-Mexico citizen has done in four games is hit .500 with nine runs batted in, helping to lead Mexico out of Pool C and into the quarterfinals.

"The fans make me happy every time they clap for me, every time they chant my name," Arozarena told reporters via an interpreter after driving in five runs in a 10-3 win over Canada on Wednesday. "It makes me play at 100 percent of my capacity."

So, there you have it. The guy performs so well on the big stage because he likes it. Given that said stage will only get bigger when Arozarena and Mexico take on Puerto Rico in Miami on Friday, it's possible nobody's seen anything yet.

Alas, Dominican Republic. We hardly knew ye.

It is, frankly, shocking that the Dominicans went just 2-2 in Pool C and failed to advance to the quarterfinals. They were supposed to be the best team in the tournament, with a lineup that Toronto Blue Jays right-hander Chris Bassitt referred to as "the best lineup ever."

Then again, that was when everyone expected Vladimir Guerrero Jr., he of the 80 home runs for the Blue Jays over the last two seasons, was expected to be part of said lineup. A knee injury nixed that plan, forcing him to withdraw on the eve of the tournament.

To be fair, Guerrero's absence wasn't the only reason the Dominicans came up short of expectations. Some of the blame also rests with Sandy Alcantara and Johnny Cueto, who got tagged for six runs in 5.2 combined innings in the two starts they made. Uncoincidentally, both turned into Ls for the D.R.

Yet even acknowledging this doesn't make it any easier to ignore that the offense posted a relatively modest .807 OPS and that only Juan Soto and Manny Machado hit balls over the fence. Guerrero's bat may not have solved everything, but it sure would have helped.

When you think of Mike Trout, what version of him do you think of?

Is it Mike Trout 1.0, who captured three MVPs and generally carved out a reputation as one of the greatest baseballers of all-time between 2012 and 2019? Or is it Mike Trout 2.0, who's missed a whole bunch of time with injuries since then, including a big chunk of 2022 with a back condition that he's supposedly going to have to manage for the rest of his career.

Perhaps it's not our business to tell anyone what they should think, but, well, everyone should be thinking about Mike Trout 1.0. That's pretty much the version Team USA got in pool play, wherein the Los Angeles Angels star batted .417 and had basically all the big hits.

One might say, "Yeah, Trout's still got it." But this was basically him picking up where he left off in 2022, as he returned from his back-related hiatus to go supernova with a .308/.370/.686 slash line and 16 home runs over 40 games to finish the year.

Don't call it a comeback, in other words. And given how good his back purportedly feels, the Trout-aissance may have only just begun.

Trout's heroics indeed made a difference for Team USA, which did what the Dominican Republic could not in surviving pool play.

But only barely, and you're not going to find anyone who thinks that Team USA's biggest weakness on paper wasn't also a weakness on the field. The pitching was supposed to be its Achilles heel, and right now there might as well be an arrow sticking out of it.

Even though he pitched four one-run innings in the opener against Great Britain, Adam Wainwright had traffic on the bases throughout. Ditto for Nick Martinez and Merrill Kelly in their turns against Mexico and Nicaragua, and they paid the price in allowing five runs over 5.2 innings.

It's almost as if the United States' pitching staff doesn't feature any of the top 11 American-born hurlers from last year. Max Scherzer was one of those guys, and his explanation for why he isn't on the team probably isn't exclusive to him.

Not entirely unreasonable, as positions go. And yet, sure's there's some kind of reason why you don't hear it coming from guys like Alcantara (D.R.), Julio Urías, Patrick Sandoval and Taijuan Walker (Mexico), José Berríos and Marcus Stroman (Puerto Rico), Pablo López and Martín Pérez (Venezuela) and Shohei Ohtani, Yu Darvish, Roki Sasaki and Yoshinobu Yamamoto (Japan).

Speaking of pitching, it is arguably on the mound where the most impressive performances of the World Baseball Classic have taken place.

For starters, let's not gloss over that there's been an actual perfect game in this year's tournament. OK, fine, more like an "actual" perfect game given that it was only for eight innings, but erstwhile top-100 prospect José De León—who mixed in 10 strikeouts in retiring 17 batters in arow—and three other Puerto Rican hurlers still made it happen against Israel.

"They didn't say a word," De León said of how his teammates were reacting as the unofficial perfecto was in progress. "That's when I knew something was happening."

Apart from that, there was Luis Garcia going to town on the Dominican Republic in relief. And Sasaki dialing it up to 101 mph as he annihilated Czech Republic hitters. And Yamamoto and Walker both striking out eight batters in four-inning, one-hit performances. And both Ohtani and Darvish both taking part in Japan's quarterfinal win over Italy.

Ultimately, it doesn't seem surprising that of the teams with the seven best ERAs for the tournament, six are still standing. By comparison, three of the four teams with the highest OPS for the tournament have already gone home.

For reasons that we can only presume are related to "Dead Pool" already being taken, Pool D of the World Baseball Classic was widely seen as the "Group of Death."

Though Israel and Nicaragua were also there, this was mainly because the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Puerto Rico were all present. Or, our first-, fourth- and fifth-ranked teams coming into the tournament. They figured to make the darn thing a bloodbath, one from which surely nobody would emerge undefeated.

But then Venezuela did just that.

As for how, well, they pitched. Only eight of the runs they allowed in 36 innings were earned, and four of those (sorry about this, Andres Machado) were charged to just one guy. Lest anyone ponder whether there was good luck involved, Venezuelan hurlers struck out 46 batters and permitted only one home run. You can't do that with luck.

Now then, just imagine if Venezuela can get the bats of Ronald Acuña Jr., Jose Altuve and Luis Arraez alongside the already scorching ones belonging to Anthony Santander and Salvador Perez. If that happens, dominating Pool D may well prove to have been a mere warm-up.

Next up: USA.

To just go ahead and hand the (low-key awesome-looking) World Baseball Classic trophy to Japan wouldn't be proper. They still technically need two more wins to earn it.

But, goodness, does it already seem like it's going to be hard to deny Japan what would be their third victory out of the five WBCs ever played.

They've won all five of their games by an average differential of seven runs. Their offense has a .996 OPS and their pitching has a 1.80 ERA. Naturally, Shohei Ohtani has contributed heavily to both with a 1.438 OPS as a hitter and 8.2 innings' worth of two-run ball as a pitcher.

Ohtani has nonetheless pushed Japan more than carried them. Which is to say he's had plenty of help from his teammates, including fellow major leaguers Lars Nootbaar and Masataka Yoshida and Nippon Professional Baseball stars like Sasaki, Yamamoto and Kensuke Kondoh. It has seemed like every given moment has been everyone's turn to shine.

The other star of Japan's run? The Tokyo Dome and the fans who packed it during pool play and the club's 9-3 quarterfinal win over Italy. Even the ambient noise was Game-7-of-the-World-Series levels of loud, yet the general vibe could nonetheless be described as "wholesome." If there's a right way to love baseball, this was it.

Everything we've talked about hasn't exactly gone undiscussed, but seemingly all anyone wants to talk about right now is Edwin Díaz's injury and its implications.

The facts are not in dispute. Díaz did his usual unhittable-closer thing in whiffing the side to secure Puerto Rico's 5-2 win over the Dominican Republic on Wednesday and, with it, a ticket to the quarterfinals. A celebration ensued, during which he somehow tore the patellar tendon in his right knee.

In all likelihood, Díaz won't pitch for the Mets this season. Steve Cohen, the team's owner, isn't ranting and raving, but his club's chances of snapping a 36-year World Series championship drought obviously aren't improved sans its $102 million closer.

Brutal. Just brutal. This, also, is a fact.

As to opinions, well, there are a lot of those going around.

Some come off as being disingenuous, including ones that amount to "well, guys get hurt in spring training, too." That works OK as a defense for Freddie Freeman's hamstring injury, but less so for Díaz's knee. It's hard to get hurt in the middle of raucous celebrations during spring training, on account of how such things don't exist.

Considerably worse, though, are takes that hold that Díaz's injury is tragic because it happened in a "meaningless" tournament. As much as that might feel true to casual observers, they're not the ones who get to decide what the World Baseball Classic means.

That's up to the participants. They're not doing it because anyone forced them. And while the the Duque Hebberts of the WBC—i.e., anyone hoping that exposure leads to a deal with a major league team—the major leaguers aren't there for the money. The prize pool maxes out at $3 million, only half of which goes to players. That's $50,000 per player. Díaz himself earned about $167,213 per appearance last season.

It simply must be, then, that major leaguers are playing in the World Baseball Classic because they want to. The specific reasons vary. For family. For heritage. For prestige. For love of country. For the kids. Heck, for fun.

Those things don't have much in common, save for that they mean something and that there's room for all of them in the World Baseball Classic. It ought to take something worse than one bad injury to ruin it.

Stats courtesy of MLB.com, Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.