Baseball Making Its Pitch to Return to the Olympic Games

Despite being rather young when the Olympic committee decided that baseball and softball would no longer be a prominent sport in the Olympic Games I can remember being distraught and upset. I never watched much of the Olympics but I always watched the baseball and softball, baseball was my life at the time. The World Baseball Classic is nice and it also pits the world’s best athletes and players against each other on a grand stage with countries bragging rights on the line but it’s not the same, it’s not the Olympics. Baseball is finally making its pitch to return to the Olympic Games when the games move to Tokyo in 2020. That pitch began this week with the start of a new Premier 12 tournament last week.

The World Baseball Softball Confederation’s 12 best teams will face off head-to-head in a tournament that will be played from November 8^th through the 21^st of this month. The winner of the tournament will be granted an automatic qualification in the 2020 Olympic Games if the sport is reinstated.

Baseball has been out of the Olympics since the 2008 Beijing Games and the decision will not be made whether to bring the games back until August of 2016. The 12 teams that will participate in the tournament with the hopes of an automatic bid into the games, again if they are reinstated, are Japan, the United States, Cuba, Taiwan, Netherlands, Dominican Republic, Canada, South Korea, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Italy and Mexico in that order from 1-12.

The United States team is made up of players currently down on the farm systems of Major League Baseball teams. The first game that the USA plays will be today, November 10^th, against the Dominican Republic inside the Taoyuan Baseball Stadium in Taipei. Go USA!

Japanese Betting Scandal hits Japanese World Series

The Pete Rose of the Japanese baseball league and the Shoeless Joe Jackson of the Japanese World Series is about to be exposed. I am exaggerating a bit to set the tone but a gambling scandal has hit Japanese professional baseball, and probably at the worst possible time. Japan’s version of the World Series is set to begin but it will not begin before Nippon Professional Baseball can announce that two more pitchers from the Yomiuri Giants bet on professional baseball games.

This is the worst possible time not only for the NPB but for baseball as a whole as the sport is still actively trying to get back into the Olympics. Two weeks ago, and this hasn’t been talked about much for whatever reason, Yomiuri Giants pitcher Satoshi Fukuda was caught betting on games involving his team as well as Major League Baseball games. Betting on games and fixing games are two different stories, and there is no evidence that Fukuda fixed games whatsoever, but neither scenario is going to help the NPB or baseball as a whole.

Shoki Kasahar and Ryuya Matsumoto have admitted to betting on baseball but deny any fixing of games, both are also members of the Yomiuri Giants. All three men, who have bet on anything from NPB games to High School games to MLB games, have given the sport the black eye and will now carry the weight of the sport if baseball, which has been out of the Olympics since 2008, does not return to the Olympic Games in 2020 when they head out to Tokyo.