MIAMI – Omar Lopez was playing three-dimensional chess and Mark DeRosa was playing checkers.
Venezuela’s manager, leading his team for the final time, showed on Tuesday night what a great dugout leader looks like. He moved his pieces when he needed to. He didn’t do more than was necessary, nor did he force anything. And in doing so, he led Venezuela to its first World Baseball Classic title, cementing his place in the South American country’s baseball history.
The entire tournament, Lopez had more to manage than just baseball. Besides managing a talented lineup that was capable of winning this WBC, though perhaps not expected to, he also had to manage a pitching staff that wasn’t nearly as deep as some of his opponents while trying to keep their Major League teams happy while also managing the emotions of his team and his baseball-mad country, which has been wracked by economic and political turmoil for more than a decade.
“Politically? I’m not going to answer that question because I said this early on, that I’m not going to answer anything about political situation, because I work in baseball,” Lopez said before the semifinal, deftly deflecting a question aimed at getting him to comment at things beyond the field and the clubhouse. “I think for us it’s more important to win tonight to keep our country happy, celebrating, and keep making noise that for the first time we’re going to be in a final, you know? I think that’s the goal tonight.”
All while working for free. Yes, that’s right, Lopez led Venezuela to the WBC title and won’t make a dime for doing it.
With a win against 4-2 win against Italy and Tuesday’s 3-2 win in the championship game, Lopez also exorcised the demons of a quarterfinal loss to the United States here at loanDepot Park in the 2023 World Baseball Classic, though he said revenge for the last classic was never on his mind.
“Oh, no, not at all. I flipped the page very fast. Regarding baseball, we have to do that, especially as a manager,” Lopez said prior to the game. “I was not depressed, and there is no revenge at all. This is just another game.”
Another game, sure, there are a lot of them in baseball, especially for Lopez, the bench coach for Major League Baseball’s Houston Astros and the manager of the the Cangrejeros de Santurce in the Liga de Beisbol Profesional Roberto Clemente, Puerto Rico’s winter league. If you start counting from MLB’s opening day in 2025, Lopez has been involved in 214 games.
But Lopez may turn the page better than anyone. As a Venezuelan, he was surely disappointed when the 2026 Caribbean Series was moved from Caracas to Guadalajara, Mexico, but once it was done, it was done.
“I’m the type of person that right away turn the page, you know, this bad news about not going to Venezuela was a long time ago,” Lopez told me in Guadalajara, just six weeks after the move of the series was announced. “It put me down for a couple of days.“
Suffice to say, it didn’t get him down. When the Caribbean Series was over, he turned the page to the World Baseball Classic, studying his players and opponents intensely. He and his staff stayed up until 3 a.m. Tuesday morning at the Ritz-Carlton in Key Biscayne studying Team USA and thinking out the strategy for tonight.
While Lopez’s team has a solid lineup, the pitchers were the pieces he needed to move around the board. Eduardo Rodriguez started, throwing 4 1/3 scoreless innings, allowing one hit, one walk, and striking out four before he was lifted after inducing a leadoff ground out to second from Team USA’s Roman Anthony in the fifth. Eduard Bazardo finished the fifth, and Jose Butto allowed a hit in the sixth.
With apologies to Yogi Berra, it was getting late early for Team USA at loanDepot Park when Angel Zerpa came on for the seventh, with the U.S. having gotten just two hits and a walk to that point.
A walk to Roman Anthony sent Zerpa to the bench to get a righty-righty matchup against Will Smith, so on came Andres Machado. Machado got the final out of the seventh and nearly made it out of the eighth unscathed, but Bryce Harper launched a 432-foot two-run homer into the fugazi ivy in center field to tie the game at two apiece.
But in the end, it was no matter. Lopez brought on Javier Sanoja to pinch run after Luis Arraez drew a leadoff walk in the eighth, and Eugenio Suarez drove him in for the go-ahead run with a double.
On came flamethrower Daniel Palencia for the ninth, and the righty with a fastball that tops out in the triple digits struck out Kyle Schwarber, induced a pop-up from Gunnar Henderson.
In the stands, the Venezuelan fans outnumbered and out-cheered the Team USA fans, and when Palencia struck out Anthony to end the game and the World Baseball Classic, giving Venezuela its first title, the screams of joy were deafening..
“Our country right now, they’re going to be, they’re going to celebrate for about a week,” Lopez said to Tom Verducci in a televised interview on the awards stand following the game.
And here’s how you know that Lopez is truly a leader. Asked by Verducci why he wasn’t nervous about this game, Lopez used his answer to spread the credit around rather than claim it as his own.
“When you have good people behind you, like Johan Santana, Robinson Chirinos, all the scouts – I don’t know if they’re on the stage right now, but there is a lot of good people,” he said, telling how they all stayed up preparing for this game until the early hours of the morning. “That was to win tonight, and we did it.”
Lopez will head back to the Houston Astros camp with a WBC gold medal, a bauble he’ll surely appreciate for the rest of his days, and a token of his final game managing Venezuela at the World Baseball Classic. He already declared before the championship game that this would be it for him with Venezuela at the WBC.
Even though he’s completed his task with Venezuela, there’s more ahead for Lopez, and when an MLB team comes calling – and after this, they soon will – the new grandmaster will get to move his pieces on baseball’s biggest stage.
Photo: Venezuela manager Omar Lopez and Luis Arraez celebrate after defeating the United States in the championship game of the World Baseball Classic, Tuesday, March 17, 2024, in Miami. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
