- Team Korea was not desperate enough to advance. That is for sure.
- Failing to conduct a smart base-running (i.e. doing some “dumb” base-running) has become a trend in last two WBCs for Team Korea. Especially, Jeong Keun-Woo, for the second time in his WBC career, has been put out at the 3rd base while running: Tokyo Dome in 2009 WBC for the first time, and today at Taichung for second time. It seems to have become a curse for him. (He was also tagged out at home trying to score in the bottom of 5th)
- In 2006, Team Korea did not make any errors throughout the entire classic. In 2009, they made 7 errors in total during 8 games, but only one of them was made while they were in Tokyo. (The game that the team made most errors was the one right before semifinals: 3 – Team Japan also made 3 in the very same game) However, in 2013, Team Korea has made 5 errors in only 3 games; 4 of them were made in the classic opener against the Netherlands.
- Team Chinese Taipei was desperate enough. It is hard to say whether the fact that they had to make it through the qualifier 4 since they were eliminated in the preliminaries in 2009 (first they lost to Korea and lost again to China) made them stronger and well-bonded or weaker and tired. However, it was obvious that they were more than anxious to advance to the next round for the first time in the Classics. Today, anyone could see how desperate they were, when a batter would slide head-on to the first after hitting a ground ball, when the starting pitcher would continue to throw even though his hand was bleeding, and when Kuo Hong-chih would throw as hard as he could, even though he went through 5 operations on his elbow.
A lot of words I can say. But I’ll save it as it is meaningless now.