The lessons of the Olympics

The Olympic baseball tournament, which concluded yesterday with Cuba’s win over Australia in the gold medal game, highlighted some of the absurdities of the politics of international baseball and its tortured relationship to the world’s top professional baseball league.

“I think it’s ridiculous we're not represented,” Houston Astros (and, theoretically, USA) outfielder Lance Berkman told the Associated Press, explaining why he and other American Major Leaguers weren’t watching the Olympic baseball tournament.

This is not a new attitude. When Team USA failed to qualify for the Olympics, their gold-medal-winning manager in Sydney, Tommy Lasorda, reacted with this silly statement:

“It’s a shock and a disgrace that the Americans won’t be represented in the Olympics. Baseball is America’s game. It doesn’t belong to the Japanese or the Cubans or the Koreans or the Italians. This is sad, very sad.”

Lasorda is wrong. America gave (modern) baseball to the world, and it is now a global sport. One Australian silver-medallist summed up the rest of the world’s attitude when he spoke to the New York Times after the gold-medal game:

“There's been such a big deal made about their not being here,” said Australia’s catcher, David Nilsson, the former Milwaukee Brewer. “ They didn't qualify. Move on. Americans are a dominating force in baseball. But other countries are improving.”

The sense of frustrated entitlement in the American baseball establishment is palpable. Sadly, few of those in the aggrieved American baseball players and managers seem to recognise where to place the blame. They should be pointing the finger squarely at Major League Baseball, which won't let the world’s top professionals compete in the world’s top athletic tournament, and is consequentially putting baseball’s status as an Olympic sport at risk.

“I don't really see it because you can’t stop a pennant race,” MLB commissioner Bud Selig said this week.

Why not? One MLB season shortened by about 10 games per team every four years would hurt nothing except the MLB owners’ profits. But the current arbitrary length of the MLB season was only extended from 154 to 162 games in 1962. To put it in perspective, there are 9,720 regular-season MLB games every four years, but the owners are not willing to dispense with about 150 of them — 1.5 percent — for the good of the game’s international development. Decisions based on maximising short-term profits over fostering a long-term globalisation strategy are foolish, and Selig should know better.

If Olympic baseball is going to continue beyond its reprieve to 2008, it must feature the best possible national teams in the world. In the immediate future, this would mean a tournament dominated by dream teams from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the USA. But to justify its inclusion in the Olympic programme, the tournament must also reflect the global spread of baseball. Europe, Oceania, and Africa must be represented, as well as the top teams from the baseball-rich regions like the Americas and North-East Asia. Quick solution: The tournament should be expanded to 12 or 16 teams in two groups.

Even this setup would mean that some of the regional qualifiers would remain be more competitive than the actual tournament. John Donovan of Sports Illustrated makes a valid analogy:

It’s great for globalization and all that — heck, nobody wants an eight-team tournament in the Olympics with six teams from the Western hemisphere — but the qualifying setup is a little like putting the Cardinals, Dodgers, Braves, A’s, Red Sox, Yankees and Angels all in one division. With no wild card.

Tough. It’s not unusual in other Olympic sports for some national trials to be closer than the actual gold medal events. It’s also the norm in the global tournaments of other team sports. Nobody complains when good European or South American teams fail to qualify for football’s World Cup while an inferior team like Saudi Arabia does. It makes those qualifying games more interesting television.

Doping is another area where there is tension between the need to integrate top professionals and the ambition to globalise the sport. American professional baseball has less stringent standards than the World Anti-Doping Agency, a fact which was a major point of dispute in the negotiations to set up a baseball World Cup.

Although overshadowed by the doping scandal involving various track and field athletes, baseball had its own doping scandal this year. Three U.S.-based players representing Greece and Italy were excluded from the tournament due to doping violations.

Olympic baseball is facing a legitimation crisis caused by the incomplete integration of the world’s dominant professional league into the nascient international structures of the sport. Unlike other international governing bodies like football’s FIFA (and even basketball’s FIBA), the IBAF is faced with only one globally-dominant professional league in its sport — one which can affort to look after its own interests at the expense of other national federations’.

Major League Baseball would prefer to abandon the Olympics in favour of a professional World Cup run at a time more convenient to its scheduling. Unsurprisingly, however, the Japanese and Korean professional leagues are not interested in playing ball exclusively on the American leagues’ terms. Globalisation will have to mean international cooperation, and that will mean MLB will have to accept giving up some control over the international game.

MLB must look at the NBA and NHL and realise that this problem can be overcome. Olympic basketball and ice hockey have become exciting professional tournaments despite facing a very similar situation. NBA teams now enjoy a global audience and a rowing global talent pool from which to recuit. If its current priorities don’t change, MLB will never enjoy anything remotely similar, and its owners will face becoming declining, increasingly parochial American businesses, while they watch basketball teams reap the profits from an expanding global market.