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Eight Home Runs Carry Cuba to Gold

ATLANTA, Aug. 2—Undefeated Cuba blasted eight home runs, including three by third baseman Omar Linares, tonight to take its second straight Olympic baseball gold medal and shut down Japan’s surprise bid at the silver medal level.

The Cubans hiked their Olympic-record, nine-game total for homers to 38 as they knocked the scrappy Japanese down, 13-9. Meantime, the U.S. team set off its own fireworks in the consolation round, smacking four homers to beat Nicaragua, 10-3, for the bronze.

Japan didn’t go meekly after a five-homer barrage Thursday night sent it past the favored U.S. team and into the championship game. It put three more shots over the fence against Cuba, including a dramatic grand slam that briefly tied the score.

But the Cubans kept banging out drives that couldn’t be caught by anyone without a ticket—a fitting conclusion to a home run-happy Olympics in which a record 127 homers were hit.

Cuba struck early with back-to-back first-inning blasts by strongmen Linares and Orestes Kindelan to go up, 3-0. It was Linares’s sixth homer of the nine-game series and Kindelan’s ninth, an Olympic record.

Linares’s towering shot—the first of his three—landed in the upper deck in left field near the foul pole, the fourth time in these Olympics a homer found the upper deck, the same number major leaguers have put up there since the Braves arrived at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium in 1966.

Aluminum bats and poor pitching are getting the blame for the long-ball barrage. Japanese starting pitcher Masanori Sugiura had an excuse—he’d pitched 5š superb innings to beat the United States just 24 hours before.

But Sugiura lasted just 1š innings tonight, left trailing, 4-0, and by the time the second inning was over, his replacement, Jutaro Kimura, had yielded another two-run blast and it was 6-0 in favor of Cuba.

Some fans wondered if the 10-run mercy rule in effect for the Games might end the lopsided fray in the seventh inning, but Japan chipped a run off Cuban ace Omar Luis in the fourth, then in the fifth revived the long-ball war in dramatic fashion.

With two out, Luis hit a batsman and walked another, then gave up a run-scoring single that left men on first and second. Yoshitumo Tani cracked a hard grounder to third that Linares fielded smoothly, but rather than throw to first for the third out, he lunged for Takayuki Takabayashi, racing for third, missed the tag and the bases were loaded.

It was a four-run mistake. Nobuhiko Matsunaka, who’d homered the night before, promptly smacked a grand slam—the first of the Games—that knotted the score. Japanese flags unfurled and 44,000 fans roared.

But the Cubans were only warming up. Miguel Caldes, light-hitting shortstop Edouardo Paeret and Linares all homered in the seventh, putting the game out of reach, and Linares finished his hat trick with a blast in the eighth.

The U.S. team shot to an early lead in the consolation game and easily took the bronze with its own homer show, beating Nicaragua, 10-3, behind a seven-inning, two-hit pitching performance by Seth Greisinger of McLean.

The Americans gained their first Olympic baseball medal (the sport has only been in the Games since 1992) and denied Nicaragua its first Olympic medal of any sort.

U.S. bats, explosive with 27 homers in the first seven games, went curiously silent and pitching was weak in Thursday’s 11-2 loss to the Japanese. But the lumber revived when Nicaraguan starter Jose Quiroz fed strongman Travis Lee a fast ball in the first inning that Lee lined over the left-field wall for a 3-0 U.S. lead.

Designated hitter Matt LeCroy crushed the next pitch over the wall in right-center and the Americans had all the runs they needed.

Greisinger, a University of Virginia standout picked sixth in the 1996 major league draft by the Detroit Tigers, weathered a rough first inning, allowing three runs on a walk, single and Henry Roa’s triple, but didn’t allow another hit in seven innings.