Venezuela WBC Champs, 2026 / UT men in the NCAA Tournament

Venezuela Takes Gold

Well, after many, many hours of watching baseball, Tuesday night I saw Venezuela beat the USA in the World Baseball Championship Final.  And, to be honest, I was kind of rooting for Venezuela.  It clearly meant something to them that it didn't to our squad.

Look, Venezuela was playing like their lives depended on it, and with joy.  The US was playing like they had to knock this out and get back to Spring Training.  If there had been a sense of fun to what they were doing, after the loss to Italy, the US had sort of lost the plot.  

Also, the closer for Venezuela (Daniel Palencia) is one of the closers for my MLB team, the Chicago Cubs.  So if he pitched near-perfectly all tournament, I'm a bit excited.  Plus, the Contreras brothers were on that team, and who doesn't like Ron Acuna Jr.?  

Look, the US lost by a run or two, depending how you want to call it.  It wasn't an embarrassing loss, and it was MLB players facing off against MLB players.

Frankly, I think the tournament was super fun.  The vibe is different from the MLB play-offs and World Series, and I know not a ton of Americans were watching, and that's a shame.  When the tournament is back in a few years, I hope Fox does a better job of promoting the tournament and Americans get over their weird feelings about the irrelevance of other countries in the sport.  Which anyone who watches baseball should know just isn't true - a huge chunk of the players on any team aren't American.  And the best player in the world is Japanese.

Univ. of Texas Men in the NCAA Tournament

Not only did I not know that the University of Texas Men were in the NCAA tournament, I didn't know they were an 11 seed.  Pretty, pretty good. 

After the WBC game, I tuned over to the men's game, and, holy smokes.  That was a nail biter.  UT scored the winning basket on the shot seen above, with 1.1 seconds remaining.

I don't watch a lot of UT men's ball, but of course I'm thrilled we're in it, and beat a team that I think of as being really solid.  Maybe UT men's hoops is on the rise?  Like, for real?