Baseball back to Olympics unlikely?
olympicbaseball March 29th, 2006
According to the Dejan Kovacevic of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he thought baseball is unlikely back to Olympics for three reasons.
Dejan, With the conclusion of the World Baseball Classic, my thoughts turn to bringing back Olympic baseball. How much of a chance do you think there is that MLB owners would be willing to copy the NHL and stop the season for the Olympics? I would think the IOC couldn’t resist bringing baseball back under these conditions.
Olympic hockey is much more fun with NHL players than it was before they participated. The every-game-is-crucial atmosphere of the Olympics, coupled with the best players in the world, makes those games as much fun as any Stanley Cup series.
Joe Deffner of Forest, Va.
KOVACEVIC: I love Olympic hockey since the NHL became involved, Joe, and I never have made any secret of that. The true beauty of it, I think, is that so many nations are competitive and take such pride in it. Witness the Finns and Swedes making the final, and not one eyebrow being raised by it.
That might be why I enjoyed the Classic as much I did, too. The games played in San Juan carried an almost-soccer-level joy to them in the stands. (And they were stands, not seats). The players — apart from some of those on the U.S. roster — looked like they took every step to make sure they were in peak form for the tournament. (Ask Salomon Torres why he was throwing his peak fastball way back in minicamp.) And, as was the case with hockey, Cuba and Japan rose up to show that baseball truly is an international game. (Especially Cuba, I think, because of the much tougher path it took to gain the final.)
But baseball back in the Olympics? Very unlikely, I think, for three reasons:
1. The owners are not going to shut down their season even for a week, much less two. They will not want to give up the money at that late point in the season. They will be even more leery of injury than with the Classic. And, unlike the NHL, MLB is not in need of the attention that comes with such a tournament.
2. The IOC really does not want baseball. That is something I saw and heard in abundance when covering the most recent Summer Olympics in Athens. All concerned felt the tournament was awful — which it was, pitting a bunch of Class AA players against each other — and were embarrassed by it. Moreover, and maybe more important, there is an IOC perception that baseball is strictly an American sport. This, of course, led to the IOC decision to dump baseball after Beijing, as well as the remarkably unfair call to throw out softball, too. (The women’s tournament, though thoroughly dominated by the U.S., did, indeed, pit the best against the best.)
3. By all accounts, the Classic did better than expected for a debut in terms of attendance and ratings, and this without the U.S. barely making a dent. That allows MLB to ride this rather than the Olympics as its primary international vehicle, all while keeping control of the proceedings.
All these concern is very reasonable and possible, and is well known by baseball fan including me. However, I still want to have Baseball in Olympics from the bottom of my heart, hope it could come true.
