WORLD BASEBALL CLASSIC: POOL B - GREAT BRITAIN VS UNITED STATES

March 7, 2026

Brad Marcelino

Daikin Park

Team Great Britain

Postgame Press Conference

USA - 9, Great Britain - 1

Q. Could you talk about Victor's debut tonight?

BRAD MARCELINO: Yeah, we knew he had that in him. Electric stuff. He's energetic on the mound, obviously, and the stuff is plus. Yeah, awesome debut. I thought he commanded the slider, kind of got better as the outing went on. Exciting to see that.

Q. As we already said, Victor was having a great game. What factored into the decision of taking him out in that situation?

BRAD MARCELINO: Yeah, you look at those swing moments. I thought he was throwing the ball well. I think the match-up we liked better with Scrubb with the curveball/changeup. The sequencing, I think we probably could have done a little better job there, but it's one of those decisions we kind of went for it based on the match-up we had and the guys coming in behind him.

Scrubb is more of a north-south guy. We liked that a little better. One of those things kind of happened, like yesterday, a pitch kind of got away from us. But that was kind of the factor that we looked at.

Q. Ian Lewis is one of the youngest players on your roster, but he's in a leadership position at short. Can you talk about what you've seen from him over the course of these first two games?

BRAD MARCELINO: Yeah, he's sort of a mini Jazz out there. He flies around the field. He's energetic. I think his mentality is a little bit different when you have a conversation with him. I think he's advanced.

Bright future and playing that shortstop, that premium position. I think you're right -- he's definitely mature beyond what he shows as far as his actual age. All the tools are there. It's exciting to see someone like that in the program.

Q. And what was going through your mind after that lead-off home run? Just kind of how much of a statement was that for Great Britain to pull that off?

BRAD MARCELINO: Obviously his plan was dialed in. He kind of said what he was going to do, executed it well. Sometimes it doesn't always work. But I thought he did a good job, obviously, executing his plan.

You go through that and you're up 1-0 going through the middle of the game and you have those little swing moments.

So there's some positives in there. I think for us, there's some good takeaways. And for when we don't necessarily have the depth of someone else, you kind of have to play perfect baseball. But I think there's some positives we can definitely take away from what we did today.