(#80)
2000 – Sydney, Australia (Gold Medal)
Nevermind that Cuba‘s Olympic baseball record against the United States stood at an impeccable 4-0 or that Team USA had its struggles a week earlier in the preliminaries. That didn’t seem to matter when the U.S. took the field against the heavily-favored Cubans. Behind Ben Sheets‘ three-hit, complete game shutout performance, Team USA took a 4-0 victory and a gold medal.
Mike Neill slugged a first-inning home run to put the U.S. on the scoreboard. Ernie Young added a bases loaded single, and Team USA turned the rest of the game over to Sheets, who at one point retired 11 straight batters. With his sinker dropping to perfection, the right-hander got 16 groundball outs in the final eight innings.
The victory was especially meaningful to Hall of Fame manager Tommy Lasorda, the head coach of Team USA. Following the victory, Lasorda celebrated with with his players and said, “This is bigger than the World Series.”
Roy Oswalt, Astros pitching prospect: On the way over there, we were getting bashed and hammered by the media saying we had no chance against Cuba. No one knew who these [U.S. players] were, who they’re sending over here. “I don’t know how they came up with these guys.” Everything you can imagine; they were trying to say we didn’t have a chance.
Mississippi JUCO star and Houston Astros prospect Ray Oswalt who pitched for the great Kenny Dupont at Holmes Community College threw out the ceremonial first pitch at our JUCO Showcase in the fall of 2000 after Team USA beat Cuba and won the Olympic Gold Medal in Sidney, Australia.
He let me try on his gold medal, but when handing it to me said, “Don’t drop it.” It was pretty heavy.
Roy made two starts in Sidney, pitched 13 innings, allowed 10 hits, 2 earned runs, walked 3, struck out 10 and had a ERA of 1.38.
He made his Major League debut with the Astros on May 6, 2001 and pitched 13 years in the big leagues, winning 20 games twice and had a total of 163 wins.
Rick Clarke's Diary of a Mad Baseball Coach 