Tarik Skubal should thank Mark DeRosa for taking WBC heat off him with wild mistake

If Tarik Skubal was resigned to thinking that his exit from the World Baseball Classic was going to be the biggest and most controversial headline to come out of this tournament, he has Mark DeRosa to thank for turning the tides.

On Tuesday night, Team Italy — led by a Colorado Rockies starter, two AL Central rookies, and a handful of guys you've never heard of — staged the upset of the decade, when they beat Team USA, led by ... well, you know.

Italy pummeled the USA into the ground through 5 1/2 innings (8-0), and although the stars and stripes staged an admirable comeback in late innings, mostly thanks to Pete Crow-Armstrong, they still lost 8-6.

That story is stunning in itself, but USA manager DeRosa just made it all worse when comments from an earlier appearance on MLB Network's Hot Stove started to gain some traction.

"We want to win this game even though our ticket's punched to the quarterfinals," he said on Tuesday morning. He wanted to "get some guys off their feet" and started Paul Goldschmidt over Bryce Harper. Most of Team USA stayed late, talking and drinking after their victory over Mexico the night prior.

The USA's ticket was not punched to the quarterfinals. Their loss, with a game between Italy and Mexico still to go, means that will only have a clearcut way into the quarterfinals if Mexico loses. If Mexico wins, a rather convoluted process of tiebreaking will commence.

Per MLB's guidelines: "the lowest quotient of fewest runs allowed divided by the number of defensive outs recorded in the games in that round between the teams tied." In other words, "the fewest runs per out in head-to-head games."

Mark DeRosa's awful mismanagement of Team USA is taking all of the negative attention away from Tarik Skubal

DeRosa said in a postgame interview that he "misspoke" on Hot Stove, but MLB — presumably to save DeRosa, an employee, some embarrassment — just made it worse when they tried to wipe the clip off the face of the internet. That, of course, didn't work. And it just made DeRosa look even worse.

No one can buy that he misspoke when he expounded upon his desire to get guys like Goldschmidt and Gunnar Henderson, playing behind Bobby Witt Jr., some playing time. He admitted before the game that there were "some guys dragging today" because of their celebrations the preceding night.

There's just no question that DeRosa thought the US was sitting pretty. The manager of what pundits are calling the greatest team ever assembled didn't know how the tournament worked, and they're facing elimination because of it.

The outrage over Skubal's departure will be rendered null and void if the US doesn't even get to a point where they could have used him if he'd stayed.

Get your tiebreaker matrices out for Italy vs. Mexico tonight. It's going to be a wild ride.