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Baseball, softball beg for reinstatement; baseball fan rants

Posted April 11, 2008 at 03:00 PM by Os Davis

Section: Beijing 2008, Summer 2016, Events, Other, Featured Writers, Os Davis

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The sorry state of American baseball (and, to some extent, softball) was well encapsulated on Wednesday, as International Baseball Federation president Harvey Schiller was reduced to showing clips from fantasy flick The Natural to IOC representatives.

Schiller gave a ten-minute presentation to Association of National Olympic Committees president Mario Vazquez Rana and various International Olympic Committee folks in an effort to have baseball reinstated for the 2016 Olympic Games. International Softball Federation head Don Porter later in the same meeting made the case for softball.

For a game that is defined by statistics like no other, here’s a particularly damning stat for baseball: When the IOC decided in 2005 not to re-up baseball and softball for the 2012 Games, the sports became the first in 69 years to be excised from the Games. That’s right: Synchronized swimming has stayed. All the equestrian events have stayed. Even silly men’s handball has more cachet than baseball in Olympic history.

Os Davis’ first rule of American sports fandom: Your game is football. Your son’s game is basketball. Baseball? That’s the sport cherished by your father who still gets misty-eyed about Sandy Koufax, the sport whose glory days have past; “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” indeed. In America, baseball is a sport mostly unloved by Anglo and African-American Generation YouTubers and why not? The million-dollar drug addicts in the big leagues pack up from your hometown team year to year, loyalty be damned. As my friend Pete always says, “These days, you’re cheering for laundry.”

Meanwhile, Major League Baseball excises its stuff from YouTube and various other minnow-sized websites with a sour vengeance akin to the British Premiership’s or the NFL’s. Bud Selig and co. seem OK with the exorcism of a large part of its fan base who never came back (yours truly included) after the disastrous 1994 labor strike. And, as in all other sports, American ballparks are pricing out the families.

Major League Baseball, which could have turned around this decision, which could have rallied the American troops to keep or at least re-enter the sport into the games but was more laissez-faire internationally than Clinton I. As a (poor) sop to lovers of international baseball (yours truly included), Selig promised that professionals would play in the World Baseball Classic, a tournament in which American professionals were promised to play; this, after all, is what the world community wants to see, cf. the encouragement of American professionals’ – international legends’ – entrance in Olympic basketball competition back in the 90s.

Problems with said “Classic”? Sure, top American players showed up for the tourney – in the middle of spring training and out of baseball shape. Additionally, the elimination round was based on single games. The semi-final saw Japan, after having already lost to South Korea twice in pool play, knocked out their 6-0 Asian rival by dint of winning one game. What was that? Worst of three?

In order to field a proper team for the Olympic Games, MLB teams would have to adopt the practice of most soccer clubs in surrendering players for the international squad mid-season. Here’s one easy solution: Each team surrenders exactly two players to the Team USA roster. During the Olympics, MLB schedules the All-Star break and that ludicrous inter-league play.

But that’s too rational, too fair, and the big-money types are too busy trying to figure ways to squeeze a few more bucks out of the increasingly small audience.

What’s terrible about American baseball in the 2000s – the steroids, the ill management, the greed – officially infected international competition with the thumbs down of 2005. What’s doubly unfortunate is that softball has to go down with the USS Doubleday.

At the reinstatement proposal, Rana reportedly hadn’t even planned to let Porter speak, even though softball doesn’t carry the taints that American baseball does and is positively flourishing in some corners of the globe. Porter claimed that 90 percent of tickets for softball had been sold, and that some five countries – Jordan, Iraq (!), Iran (!!!), Liberia, Sierra Leone – have recently established governing organizations for women’s softball. In the ‘States, it is the no. 1 league participatory sport for women and ladies have taken to the game in Australia and China in particularly great numbers.

My recommendation: Drop baseball if the top levels don’t care, and reinstate softball.

However, American softball could also be doing a lot better in the marketing sphere. To wit: Why are there not more NCAA softball games on ESPN? What is the deal with National Pro Fastpitch? Why is this league not getting national exposure? Why are these games never on television? Wouldn’t people watch?

Oh, yes, they would.

They won’t be come Olympic time 2012, however.

Incidentally, back in 2005 when baseball/softball’s Olympic lease was cancelled, sports up for consideration in filling the gap included karate, squash, rugby sevens (a shoo-in before too long, you can bet), and golf. These game have, it seems, proven adaptable to the international 21st century and are the future.

Baseball, it seems, is not.