Cheers for new qualification system

The changes to the Olympic baseball qualification system have been welcomed in the United States, where the few people who care about international baseball are still irked by Team USA's failure to qualify for Athens. For example, the San Jose Mercury News:

All that concern about the United States failing to qualify for the Olympics in baseball tended to overlook the fact that Team USA had been dominant in the qualifying round before being upset in the final round.

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Now steps have been taken to create a fairer system. The IBA announced Thursday that qualification will now be based on the results of the entire tournament and that single-elimination games will no longer be part of the format.

They fail to notice that the USA still would not have qualified had the new system been in place in 2003. The USA still finished fifth in the Americas qualifying tournament. Only the top four teams from the Americas would have a chance to qualify under the new system. If the Americans were robbed, it was because of a defect in the structure of the Americas qualifying tournament, not the IBAF's rules.

That said, the new system truly is an improvement because it is a workable compromise between the need to ensure representation from many regions and the need to give teams in the overwhelmingly more competitive qualifying regions (Asia and North America) the extra shots they probably deserve. Forget Team USA: last time around was a fluke. They have learned their lesson and will send a stronger team to the 2007 qualifiers. I've never understood why the Dominican Republic or Venezuela, for example, never had a chance.