What to Make of Baseball's Extinguished Olympic Flame

By Ken Dynamo
Posted Sunday, August 31, 2008

Now that China has extinguished the Olympic torch, packed up their Olympic regalia and fired up the factories to once again blanket Beijing with a familiar layer of lung choking smog, baseball's brief experiment with the Olympic Games has been likewise snuffed, possibly for good.

Having gotten the boot for London 2012, the earliest baseball could come back is the 2016 games. This has not caused as much of an uproar as some might expect, although plenty of sports scribes have voiced their displeasure (for an incredibly cogent debate by consummate professionals, check this out, but do please come back when you're through).

Personally, I couldn't give less of a crap. I care about one baseball team, and they wear blue and orange (and unfortunately sometimes black) and I'm pleased to see Bud Selig and his MLB braintrust appear nearly as nonplussed as myself.

This is not because I am against the international expansion of MLB and the game of baseball itself. Far from it. A strong presence abroad is paramount for the growth and vitality of the league. But baseball as an Olympic sport is not a god fit, at least right now, and the goals are not and should not align with the Olympics the way the sport is currently established.

The Olympics as a stupid thing

We're at the point now where everyone has watched a sport like synchronized swimming, skeet shooting or the quote-unquote modern pentathlon and said to themselves, 'You mean THIS is an Olympic sport?' Yep, and the reason they are Olympic sports is because the Olympics are, in fact, totally dumb.

The International Olympic Committee, the faux-aristocrats in charge of the whole shebang, like to wrap themselves in a cloak of nobility and spout off about the purity of athletic pursuits and the spirit of the games. That's all well and good, but did anyone else watch the women's beach volleyball finals? Hot babes running around in the sand in white bikinis. In the rain. With Jock Jams on PA so the cheerleaders would have something to dance to.

Oh sure, that's real Citius, Altius and Fortius. Come on, grow up.

The Olympics we're founded by a bunch of elitist swine from French to show off how much free time rich people had. It's since been co-opted and corrupted by politicians and national agendas and only exisits now as a subsidary of it's corporate overlords at NBC, McDonalds and Coca-Cola. Baseball is really not missing out on all that much.

The only ones truely boned are the Cubans

The main justification for giving baseball the heave-ho is that the best athletes in baseball do not compete during the Olympic games. This is true (with the exception of our poor tropical, Communist brothers) and this is an entirely justifiable reason to exclude the games.
Because of the unfortunate overlapping of schedules, no Major League ball club is going to give the OK and allow their best players, or even their crappiest players, to take two weeks or more off the middle of the season to compete in an exhibition tournament. While I don't fault the pro franchises for exercising this prerogative, I can understand the IOC's frustration at this fact. Can you imagine how boring the Olympic basketball tournament would be if the participants were still amateurs only? What a god awful waste of time.

Since the only 'amateurs' in baseball still competing at a high level are the indentured servants held captive by Team Castro, the competition level at the Olympics can best be described as a swirling vortex of suck. Everyone in Beijing may have been playing their guts out but that doesn't change the act that they're still all scrubs, and no one volunteers to watch scrubs. Or if they do there is usually a free bobblehead involved.

Do not judge sports on 'Olympicness'

Team sports at the Olympics are a strange lot. They are either 'fringe' sports that only thrive in US colleges like water polo, volleyball and field hockey; or they are basketball, which were it not for the cold war, might also have been cast off into the Olympic dustbin. There is also handball but really, what the hell is handball anyway? Honestly I would like to know.

Oh and I guess ice hockey is kind of a big deal in the winter, but anyway, look at some of the other international team sports that aren't recognized by the Olympics. Thanks to British imperialism, cricket and rugby are played all over the globe and they aren't excluded from the Olympics because of popularity concerns. 1.5 billion Indians and Pakistanis can't be wrong, after all.

Furthermore, men's field hockey is a sport. Really? How about initiating cake baking or sweater knitting a men's Olympic sport too?

Point is, all sorts of great events are also not in the Olympics, so there's no point in getting into a hissy over baseball's alleged loss of prestige.

Soccer as inspiration

Soccer is in the Olympics because the Olympics needs soccer, not vice versa. The best players are not fully represented (it is essentially an under 23 tournament with 3 age exemptions per team) and it is not nearly the most important tournament for the sport. The World Cup trophy dwarfs a gold medal in international significance.

That's what baseball should aspire to, and I believe it is taking steps to do this.

Beyond the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and a few other Caribbean strongholds that major league teams mines for talents, MLB must expand it's search to the rest of the world. Japan, Korea and Taiwan hardly need their passion for baseball whipped up by Selig et al, but their domestic leagues' ties to MLB should be respectfully strengthened.

The World Baseball Classic, though a rather silly idea on it's face, must be continually tweaked and hyped. The next step, which Keith Law has strongly endorsed, is to implement regional qualifying tournaments engage more countries with less interest in baseball. Africa and South America are the key components to this strategy.

Once the participation levels on an international level are deepened and expanded, baseball can be reintroduced to the Olympics with some restrictions on player participation, especially on pitchers. Then MLB must throw its support behind by requiring teams to allow for at least one pitcher and position player to be picked for a national team, whose nations would choose by draft. Or something like that. I dunno, I'm making this all up as I go here.

What this has to do with the Mets

Not a whole lot in the next eight years, obviously. Brandon Knight, who comported himself with valor but hardly distinction in his one start with the Mets this year was the only person on the entire US roster that was part of the Mets organization to compete in Beijing, where he was equally craptacular. Were Knight to have had a career ending injury in China (and god forbid, I am certainly not advocating this), the impact on the Mets franchise would be pretty much zero.

However, in the long run, as I have mentioned, international expansion is paramount for the growth of MLB, and that includes the Mets. New global markets mean deeper reservoirs of talent to draw from and more potential fans. As the internet becomes an even bigger piece of the broadcast puzzle, the importance for fans to be within close physical proximity to the home stadium will matter even less. The popularity of the game will grow and the games themselves will become more competitive.

And all of this can be accomplished with or without the Olympics. As long smart international growth is maintained, we can avoid all the ridiculous politicking that is involved. Had all this been sorted out before baseball become a medal sport we may have had the privilege of watching David Wright in a red white and blue uni, or Johan Santana in the yellow, red and blue (or burgundy, I'm not quite sure how Venezuela picks their team colors). Until then that time, though, I think we'll have enough baseball to occupy ourselves.

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Ken Dynamo also updates his tastefully blog GO METS DIE BRAVES with as many curse words as possible as often as possible.