Cuba tops U.S. in final at-bat

By Ben Shpigel

c.2008 New York Times News Service

BEIJING — The baseball rivalry between Cuba and the United States is not dead, not even close. Their intense game Friday afternoon, tied after 10 innings, yielded the first Olympic case of a quirky new tiebreaker system that, indirectly, left a United States player in the hospital, both managers sniping at each other and Cuba a 5-4 winner in 11 innings.

For several minutes afterward, the United States players sat in their dugouts, staring straight ahead, apparently too numb to move. They had just watched Cuba send them to their second straight loss in a final at-bat, cluttering their path to the four-team medal round, while indefinitely losing their starting second baseman, Jayson Nix, with an eye injury.

The unusual tiebreaker — if teams are tied after the 10th, each half-inning begins with runners on first and second, no outs, and at any place in the batting order — had already added a layer of intrigue to a compelling game by the time Nix led off in the bottom of the 11th with the United States trailing, 5-3. Squaring to bunt, Nix fouled a pitch from Pedro Luis Lazo upward, hitting his left eye and caroming into foul territory. The U.S. manager, Davey Johnson, said in a postgame news conference that he thought Lazo was purposely trying to injure Nix with a high-and-inside pitch. Johnson said Nix’s eye was bleeding and had swollen, and that he had been taken to a local hospital for evaluation.

“In my wildest imagination, I didn’t think they would throw at my player’s coconut,” Johnson said.

Told of Johnson’s comments, the Cuban manager, Antonio Pacheco, said his players respect every opponent and that Johnson was showing a lack of respect toward them.

“It was a lack of respect on the part of the American coach to say that,” Pacheco said. “The Cuban team respects the game and respects our opponents and is incapable of doing that.”

To confound matters further, the translator did not accurately translate the comments of Pacheco or Lazo — when told, the mediator tried cutting off the line of questioning — leaving the Spanish-speaking news media to clarify their thoughts.