China is reporting that the Cuban media is beside�themselves in the story Cuban press mourns baseball World Cup loss. The article, which quotes from the  Cuban newspaper Granma, admits the better team won, and:

All of Cuba feels the pain of this loss, not because we lost to the United States, but because we lost in baseball, the national passion that none of us escape from if we live on this island.

Surely the players felt the pain as well, although it would appear pitcher Pedro Lazo eased his a bit by selling the jersey off his back.

According to the Dashiell Hammett of the Bangkok Post:

Pedro Luis Lazo wanted to sell his number 99 jersey. A man followed Lazo to a dark corner and began to bargain in a hushed voice, writing numbers on a piece of paper.

Before onlookers knew what was happening, the deal was done. The thirty-ish Taiwan man pushed a stack of cash into Lazo’s hand and received from Lazo a baseball player’s white shirt.

According to the article Lazo received 6,000 New Taiwan dollars (about $185). The man who bought the shirt said it was a steal and much lower than the price that�sort of item fetches on the�Internet.

Finally, there were few teams that disappointed in the Cup more than Chinese Taipei, who, as the host country and an emerging face in world baseball, had hoped to challenge.�

But after finishing No. 2 in Group��the team seemed poised to�make a nice run, but after losing to the United States on Friday, the team�went on to lose to�South Korea�and finally�Mexico to end up in�8th place. Tawainbaseball.com tries to get to the bottom of what happened here.�