Pinoys still SEA Games baseball kingpins
EIGHT years after winning its last championship in 2011, the Philippines showed it still is a force to reckon with in baseball in the Southeast Asian Games.
The Filipino batters, shamed Thailand, 15- 2, in their winner- take- all battle for supremacy on Sunday, eight years after the sport was last played in this bi- annual conclave.
Playing before a noisy, boisterous standing room only gallery at The Village at the Clark International Sports Complex, the Filipinos proved they still have what it takes their predecessors displayed in winning the First Asian gonfalon in 1954.
Unlike, though, when the two teams met in the elimination round, which the Filipinos barely survived, 3-2, Sunday’s finale was sort of a walk-in-the park for the hosts, who take the pride of once the third best in the world.
This happened on account of UAAP MVP Fancis Gesmundo’s brilliant stint on the mound three and 1/3 innings where he allowed only two hits before yielding the pitching chores to Romeo Jasmin.
The fastball throwing Gesmundo, likewise, struckout two of the nine batters that crossed his path in that stretch.
To complete the rout, head coach Orlando Binarao allowed two more relievers — Vladi Eguia and Miguel Salud to finish off the Thai’s, from who the Filipinos took the throne in 2011, title pretensions.
Alhough the Filipinos could’ve easily won the tiara in an abbreviated fashion like what they did to Singapore, 17-0, Indonesia, 14-1 and Cambodia, 12-0, earlier in the eliminations, they didn’t because, as a rule, the 10-run mercy provision dispensed with in championship matches.
“Our execution of plays and strategies were superb. The boys struck to them to the letters,”
Binarao, a first time baseball coach, who was a stalwart of the Blu Boys in many of softball’s international title conquests, said.
“Medyonag- relax nanungbandanghuli when the championship was already safe in our hands,” Binarao added. “We don’t have to kill naman ang kalaban. “
“We, after all, are in sports. Besides, some of their ( Thais) team officials and even players mga kaibigan din natin at fellow competitors,” he said rather philosophically.
The other side of the field saw, too, the complete superior strength of the Filipinos in the game that failed to catch the imagination of their countrymen, including the media nowadays despite its rich winning tradition in the global arenas.
With centerfielder Erwin Bosito at the forefront of Binarao boys’ offensive rotation, the Filipinos rained the Thais with eight hits till halfway through the two-hour contest before relaxing a bit in the homestretch when the title was already in the bag.
A ferocious three-run salvo engineered by Bosito in the opening frame was all the Philippines, bronze medalist in the First World Amateur Championship held in Honolulu in 1966, needed in claiming their fourth jewel.
The host country, which also captured a pair of Asian Championships bronze medals, the last in 2001, nevertheless, were masters of their rivals with four more markers in the second frame that finally broke the back of the one-time titleholder.
This was only the fourth time baseball was disputed in this once every two-year meet with the Filipino clouters binging home the plum thrice, including that in the 2005 new episode held also their shore in 2007.