Swifter Higher: 30 Sports in 30 Days: Baseball

30 Sports in 30 Days: Baseball

Cuban players celebrate during the 1996 gold medal game.

There are 30 sports on the Olympic program this year, and each will get a brief overview as we keep the countdown to Beijing going. First, one of the two sports that will have its last Olympic go-round at the 2008 Games (the very similar softball is the other).

The great ball sports that are played the world over -- such as football, basketball, even handball and table tennis -- have one simple thing in common: the object is to propel the orb around and past the opposition. This is what baseball is about, too, but that's the job of the defense; most ball sports give you points and wins for getting the ball past the enemy the most often. What makes baseball revolutionary is also what makes it confusing and obscure, and as such it probably doesn't belong in a global event like the Olympics.

In 2005, the IOC voted baseball and softball out of the Olympic Games, the first two sports to be cut since polo (a similarly provincial pursuit) was axed in 1936.

There are 112 countries in the International Baseball Federation, but make no mistake -- the power in the sport is clearly concentrated in the Americas and on the Pacific Rim. In the four previous Olympic tournaments, no European team has won a medal, and the three European entries at Athens 2004 (Italy, Greece and the Netherlands) went a combined 4-17. The entire continent of Africa has only sent a single team in Olympic baseball history, a South African squad that finished 1-6 in Sydney eight years ago.

The 1992 and 1996 tournaments were amateurs-only, won by the Cubans and their state system full of world-class players. Professionals were allowed starting in 2000, but because the Olympics coincides with the American major league season, recent events have attracted no top players. In Sydney, an American team of minor-leaguers managed by Tommy Lasorda shut out Cuba 4-0 in the gold medal game. Many of those American players went on to become major league stars. The U.S. followed up that performance by not even qualifying for the 2004 Games.

Olympic baseball is a little different than that played in the American major leagues. All teams use a designated hitter instead of allowing the pitcher to bat, a single infielder can visit the mound at a time (as opposed to the occasional seven-man parties that occur when a manager or coach visits the pitcher), and a mercy rule is applied if one team is ahead by 10 or more runs after seven or eight innings.

(illustrations by B.D. McKay)

Baseball fun facts:

Chinese Taipei won the first official Olympic baseball game, an 8-2 victory over Italy in the 1992 preliminaries.
There was no mercy rule in that first Olympic tournament. Japan beat the Dominican Republic 17-0 in the preliminaries, and Chinese Taipei whitewashed Spain 20-0 on the same day.
In 1956, an exhibition between the U.S. and Australia at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds drew 114,000 spectators. That world record was only recently eclipsed by an exhibition between the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers at another former Olympic venue, the L.A. Memorial Coliseum (3/29/2008).
Baseball was a demonstration sport in 1912 at Stockholm. The United States beat Sweden 13-3, which is likely the same kind of score that would occur if the two countries met on the ballfield today.

In 2008:

There will be eight teams at the fifth Olympic baseball tournament. Defending champion Cuba will be there, as well as the U.S., Chinese Taipei, Canada, Japan, South Korea and the Netherlands. China earns a berth by virtue of hosting the Games. Australia, which won the silver in Athens, did not qualify after finishing with four wins and three losses in the March entry tournament.

All-time medal standings: