PHOENIX — As much as he marvels at the emerging talent on the Canadian national team, Freddie Freeman also struggles to wrap his mind around just how young some of his World Baseball Classic teammates are.
“I’m playing with a guy who was born in 2003,” the star Los Angeles Dodgers first baseman said Friday during Pool C’s workout day at Chase Field. “That’s just crazy to me.”
Mitch Bratt, the Texas Rangers A-ball lefty from Newmarket, Ont. who is set to start against the powerhouse United States on Monday, is the youngest of five players born this century suiting up for Canada.
Each has impressed in different ways this week, but the one who may be most pivotal to the national team’s chances is Bo Naylor, the 23-year-old Cleveland Guardians catcher who’ll be doing the heavy lifting behind the plate once the tournament starts.
A limited history with the 14 pitchers on the Canadian staff — he’d only caught Guardians teammates Cal Quantrill and Cade Smith previously — has turned this week into a crash course.
Ranked as baseball’s No. 64 prospect by MLB Pipeline and No. 68 by Baseball America, he’s had his hands full figuring out how each staff member likes to work, the way their stuff moves, how they like him set up by the plate.
The way he’s handled the situation “has really impressed me,” said Freeman. “I think he's going to be a good one for a long time.”
Learning so many new pitchers so quickly requires “a lot of conversation, definitely,” said Naylor, whose process involves “picking and choosing your spots to get as much information as you can.”
“I've had the pleasure of catching a few of them through these last couple of games and these practice days present more opportunity to get on the same page,” he added. “Really using that time to get to know them as much as possible.”
Helpful is that Quantrill will start Sunday’s opener against Great Britain and while they haven’t worked together in a game yet, they’ve had lots of bullpens and live at-bats together at the Guardians’ complex over the winter and into spring.
With Quantrill, Naylor expects “a lot of stuff moving in a lot of different directions,” he said. “That's the simplest way to put it. And just a guy who competes his ass off. He's going to go out there, have a lot of quick innings and give his team a chance to win.”
QUANTRILL IN LINE
A lesson learned by the Canadians from the 2009 World Baseball Classic, when they started Vince Perkins against Italy to save Scott Richmond for a game against Venezuela they never got to play, is to take nothing for granted.
That’s the main reason Cal Quantrill is starting the opener against Great Britain rather than Mitch Bratt, Noah Skirrow or Rob Zastryzny, the starters in line behind him. Losing the opener would make advancing to the second round even more difficult than it is already, so they don’t want to take any chances.
“We think the first game is very important for us,” said manager Ernie Whitt, “and he's our most experienced pitcher that we have as far as the starter is concerned.”
Using Quantrill against the Brits would also allow him to start in the quarter-finals, should Canada get that far, and the Guardians helped everything fall into place.
“Ernie reached out pretty early just to let me know what game he wanted me to start,” said Quantrill. “Carl Willis, our pitching coach, had a plan making sure I would be on five days rest for that game and I had lots of warning, started the Cactus League opener so it would continue on five days.”
SUPER SCOUTING
Even at the World Baseball Classic data matters and the Canadians are planning to use a combination of info from the TruMedia analytics platform, advance reports from Minnesota Twins scout Walt Burrows and the eye test of what they see on the field to position their fielders.
Third base coach Tim Leiper, a roving instructor in the San Francisco Giants system, will be tasked with putting both infielders and outfielders in place. The info will be formatted into data cards big-league players familiarly use, although he believes some feel will be needed, too.
“The one thing about the tournament is we want to know where the ground balls are hit, we want to know the general direction the fly balls go, but there's such a degree of randomness in the game,” explained Leiper. “It's early in spring, you've got different pitchers that you're not used to on your side, and swings aren't where they really are mid-season. So it's great to put them in a spot where you can start, but the message is — and what the guys have been really great at — is start reading swings and start reading situations and what a guy's trying to do and let's trust our eyes, because that's going to give us a much better feel out there on the field.”
QUOTABLE
“They're all speaking French on the infield so I didn't really know what was going on during the pitching changes.” — Freddie Freeman on playing alongside Quebec infielders Edouard Julien, Otto Lopez and Abraham Toro.
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