2008: Last Time For Our Pastime

My apologies, but this entry does contain a hint of politics—but mostly sports. For those who haven’t heard, the Olympics dropped baseball and softball from the 2012 games in London. The IOC (Int’l Olympic Committee) voted to drop the two from the 28 game schedule on grounds that they aren’t popular enough worldwide and competition is not strong.
First off, I have had a longtime suspicion that Europe has always had the largest influence in the Olympics, and this just proves it. (And yes, I do realize the modern games began in southern Europe, but the world is a completely difference place than it was in 1896.) Many consider baseball to be too American as it was founded here and is considered our ‘pastime.’ However, since its inclusion into the Olympics in 1992, how many gold medals has the old US of A taken home? One. For those who also are unawares of the new Baseball World Cup that debuts this year, we are not even the favorites. Any true baseball fan will (reluctantly) tell you that the true baseball hotspot these days is Latin America. It has also picked up drastically with Asians. I have a feeling Europeans simply consider baseball to be too bloody boring.
I had a good chat on the subject with my foreign co-worker/friend and, as usual, he took the opinion opposing America. He claimed most sports that have such strong regional ties are not included in the Olympics, for instance Taekwondo and Karate, because the rest of the world cannot compete; this was followed up with something about how the rest of the world doesn’t care about baseball and its lameness. I sat down on the internet and looked up the current games and Taekwondo and Judo were most certainly included. (I will also mention that I was proud to see the one gold medalist out of the eight that wasn’t Oriental happened to represent the U.S.) The list of five sports that would fill the two open spots for 2012: golf, rugby, roller sports, karate, and squash. Now tell me how the latter two are not extremely regional games. Squash?! You’ve got to be joking…
Lastly, ridding the Olympics of baseball because *some* view it as lacking competition is the worst thing that can be done to the international sport. Take basketball, for instance, which was also coincidentally introduced in 1992. The U.S. has always been dominant while the rest of the world tried catching up. Well, they finally did and we lost last year. No, we barely grabbed the bronze. With other countries continually gunning for us, and the fact that baseball is growing, by 2012 it would be intriguing. The latest representative to speak out against removing baseball is from Greece. See note above about birth location of Olympics…
Oh well, it’ll be back. I’m not going to defend softball because, after all, we did sweep the Athens games 9-0 while outscoring our opponents 51-1. Yeah, we gave up one run in the gold medal game. That game also happened to be our national team’s 79th win in a row. Yikes. Good luck, rest-of-the-world.