It's the first day of the Big Ten tournament in March... so here's a thread about Olympic baseball!
Was speaking with a Japanese colleague last week about the upcoming 2020 Olympics (now starting in summer 2021). We were uncertain about which new sports the host country added and looked into it: surfing, skateboarding, sport(rock)-climbing, karate, and... baseball/softball.
More info on these: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zm4h7nb
So... I went to see who was on the US men's team (https://www.baseballamerica.com/stories/team-usa-2020-olympic-baseball-qualifying-roster/) and found:
https://www.baseballamerica.com/players/6867/jake-cronenworth/
And for the US women's softball team, this:
https://www.teamusa.org/usa-softball/athletes/Amanda-Chidester
Probably already mentioned on this site about 1+ year ago, but never a bad time to remind people.
March 10th, 2021 at 12:25 PM ^
Cronenworth played in the majors last year and did really well, I doubt he would give that up to play for the national team this summer. I don't know anything about olympic baseball, so maybe he would, but it would seem strange to me.
It's a shame that the summer olympics take place during the MLB season (and that MLB is unwilling to stop their season), because the baseball tournament could be just as great for the sport as the winter olympics are for hockey.
With the fact that pitchers now seem to be only able to throw about 200 innings a year, it might be an unsolvable problem. No way would a Major League team allow their ace to waste 20 or 30 of his innings on a world championship. I know they have that world tournament thing in March every few years, but that's treated as spring training and certainly not as the pinnacle of a career.
Hockey was great with NHL players participating - but most recent Olympics did not include them; will be interesting to see what happens in the future. Still watched a bunch of games, but much harder to get excited when you don't recognize many of the players.
EDIT: Looks like they will be back for the next 2 games, so a big win in my book. I also didn't realize NHL players had only been in the Olympics since 1998. Realize it wasn't always the case, but figured it was at least more similar timing-wise to basketball. https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/30625255/nhlpa-boss-donald-fehr-expects-nhl-follow-plan-2022-olympics
Right, that's it exactly. Soccer gets it right--people root for their local teams, and of course that's fun, but there is nothing like a world tournament with the best players competing at the top of their games.
It's upsetting that it's so hard to get buy-in from MLB and NHL to make these tournaments happen.