The 2008 Baseball Olympic tournament is about to begin.  At 03.30 BST, Chinese Taipei and the Netherlands will take to the Wukesong Baseball field for the first of thirty-two games to be staged over the next week and a half.  It is a crucial period for the sport’s international future, following the decision by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to remove baseball (and softball) from the Olympics after this year’s event.  Baseball fans want to see the sport back in the Olympics for the 2016 Games (four years too late for us Brits, mind you) and a high-quality event this year certainly won’t hurt the chances of this becoming reality.  Continue reading →

All baseball fans frustrated that the sport will be dropped from the Olympics after this year’s tournament will be interested in reading this story from the BBC website detailing allegations that a Japanese cycling event, the keirin, “may have bought its way into the Olympic Games“.

To pick out a pertinent quote from the article: “critics say that the system by which events go in and go out of the Olympics is seriously flawed, with little or no oversight”.

Following on from the recent comments by MLB and the IBAF about the sport’s Olympic future, as discussed here last week, the president of the IBAF, Harvey Schiller, has issued an ‘update’ message to all member federations.  The British Baseball Federation has published this on their website and you can view it here.  It doesn’t contain a great deal of new information, although it’s good to learn that tickets for the baseball games at the Beijing Olympics sold out “almost immediately”.

When you weigh up baseball’s case against some other Olympic sports in terms of global interest and participation, it’s hard not to feel slightly bitter about the way that it has been kicked to the curb.  Baseball and softball have a strong argument for reinstatement (if there aren’t interior motives at work in the IOC over the issue) and we can only hope that the efforts by all concerned will be rewarded in due course.