{"id":539700,"date":"2026-03-14T09:52:34","date_gmt":"2026-03-14T09:52:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/539700\/"},"modified":"2026-03-14T09:52:34","modified_gmt":"2026-03-14T09:52:34","slug":"at-the-wbc-mark-derosa-screwed-up-then-mlb-streisanded-the-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/539700\/","title":{"rendered":"At The WBC: Mark DeRosa Screwed Up & Then MLB Streisanded The Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tfrom the nice-try dept<\/p>\n

The World Baseball Classic is currently going on and I absolutely adore it. Essentially a World Cup for baseball, 20 nations are playing against one another in a banger of a tune-up for the Major League Baseball season. It\u2019s a flamboyant delight, with cultural celebrations such as the Italian team doing a shot of espresso after they hit home runs in the dugout.<\/p>\n

The American team is managed by former major leaguer Mark DeRosa. While I won\u2019t bore you with too many gory details, DeRosa royally fucked up during the tail end of pool play<\/a>. Through a complicated series of winning scenarios and tie-breaker rules, the American team headed into its game with Italy needing to win to secure its place in the playoffs. DeRosa, it appears, was under an entirely different impression<\/a>. These were his comments before the game with Italy.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

After the game, he mentioned that some of his players were \u201cdragging\u201d on the field and he essentially put in a lineup that didn\u2019t include many of the normal starting players. If you don\u2019t know professional baseball culture, there\u2019s a reason for the dragging. With nothing at stake, it\u2019s pretty clear DeRosa thought the playoffs were already secured\u2026 and told his players to go out and celebrate that night. They likely did, late into the night and with the help of plenty of alcohol. Then they lost to Italy, which meant they needed Italy to win or to get into tie-breaking scenarios against their next game with Mexico. They got lucky in that Italy did beat Mexico in the next game, but the fuck up took things out of the hands of Team USA, leaving it up to their rivals.<\/p>\n

You may not care about any of the above, but baseball fans do. DeRosa, in his day job, is also an employee of MLB, serving as a commentator on the MLB channel. MLB itself took down the original video of DeRosa\u2019s comments and put up a version in which you don\u2019t hear DeRosa\u2019s mistake nor his admitting later that he screwed up.<\/p>\n

Also,\u00a0this reporting from The Athletic<\/a>\u00a0doesn\u2019t actually make things look better for DeRosa and Team USA:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe league appears to have taken down video that included DeRosa\u2019s mistaken comments from MLB.com, with attempts by The Athletic to access it yielding error messages early Wednesday morning. A version of the interview that remained on MLB Network\u2019s Facebook page appeared to be condensed and did not include the now-scrutinized remarks.\u201d<\/p>\n

I really don\u2019t know what MLB was thinking here. American baseball fans would somehow forget what they heard DeRosa say? A screw up that could have bounced the American team from the WBC entirely would somehow fly under the radar?<\/p>\n

Regardless, the Streisand Effect took over and now then the reporting on all of this went into wide circulation. In discussing MLB\u2019s attempt at the hidden ball trick, reporting on DeRosa\u2019s fuck up went through another, and larger, round of reporting. By trying to hide what DeRosa did, MLB made it public all the more.<\/p>\n

This is classic Streisand Effect stuff at work and I can barely believe that Major League Baseball thought this isn\u2019t exactly what would occur.<\/p>\n

\n

\tFiled Under: baseball<\/a>, mark derosa<\/a>, streisand effect<\/a>, wbc<\/a>
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Companies: mlb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"from the nice-try dept The World Baseball Classic is currently going on and I absolutely adore it. Essentially…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":539701,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,591,85],"class_list":["post-539700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}