You guys remember Kawasaki's (might have been Nishioka, but whatever) SF running from 3B that got erased in the first WBC against Team USA?
MLB umps don't even understand how to call it, so you can obviously tell that almost no one does baserunning well in MLB.
In any case, Japanese teams have totally unathletic players, but they can cap losses with technique (Aoki has particularly bad technique, but he's always been a golden boy type, not a technique player like Ichiro/Kawasaki/Matsui).
But the Cubs indeed were smart on the basepaths.
In the 10th inning, they had a runner who went cautious with a big popup, tagged up and took 2B instead of praying the ball would fall.
For the M's, Seager trying to take 2nd on an obviously long single might be the crux of the problem.
Because you can also argue that aggressive baserunning is important and the M's have been hung up on this for the better part of the decade...