Coumnist: "Scrap Olympic baseball"

I don't agree with him, but Chicago Tribune sports columnist Philip Hersh makes the best argument yet for why why Olympic baseball should be scrapped. While the IOC won't risk offending individual sports federations by implementing this, Hersh thinks the following philopsophy should be applied to trimming the increasingly unwieldy Olympic program:

1. No more sports, or events within sports, that appeal to or are dominated by only a few of the 202 nations coming to the 2004 Olympics.
2. No more sports for which the Olympics aren't the most important competition.

Applying this principle, and throwing in a few sports he just considers "silly" or elitist, Hersh argues that baseball (along with softball, basketball, football, tennis, modern pentathlon, synchronized swimming, boxing, equestrian, Taekwondo, rowing, sailing, canoe-kayak, synchronized diving, and trampoline) ought to be scrapped.

He may have a point in insisting that the Olympics be the key tournament in a given event. However, Hersh fails to understand how important having a sport on the Olympic programme is to having its grassroots development funded in countries where it is a minority pursuit. Just because they won't win medals any time soon, just the potential of fielding an Olympic team in one of these obscure sports will mean that its develompent is taken seriously at the national level.