Baseball Aims for 2016 Return to Olympics; 'Best Players' Will Be Available

With baseball wiped off of the Olympic slate for the 2012 Olympics in London, MLB President Bob DuPuy and player's union chief Donald Fehr went before the IOC Moneay with International Baseball Federation president Henry Schiller to plead baseball's case for reinstatement to the games by 2016. Their presence at the meeting was undoubtedly to calm the IOC's concerns that Major League Baseball isn't supportive of the Olympics.

In fact, the Chicago Tribune's Phil Hersch is reporting some interesting concessions that MLB says they're willing to make to accommodate the Olympics. Among the more interesting is that they say they won't schedule major league games on the day(s) that the medal games are played and that they'll make a "representative number of the best players available" to play in the proposed five-day Olympic tournament.

This is, from what i can tell, a logistic nightmare. If Chicago hosts the 2016 Olympics, it might not be a big deal to send some players to the Olympics, but what if the games are in Tokyo or Madrid? You'd be asking a big-league club, potentially in the heat of a pennant race (the Olympics are always in August), to give up one of their best players for a week or so. No team will ever agree to that and honestly, I doubt many players would either.

It really seems to me like Major League Baseball is trying to have its cake and eat it too when it comes to the Olympics. They've already created a tournament to push as the premier international event in the World Baseball Classic and they've had at least reasonable success to this point with the WBC. Trying to turn the Olympics into something similar, especially when it takes place in the middle of the season, is really asking a lot. I'm sure that a vast majority of readers could tell me that Italy won soccer's last World Cup, but how many people know that Argentina won the gold medal in the Olympics last summer?

Instead of bowing to the IOC's demands, why not focus on making the WBC a bigger, better event? Cramming a premier international baseball event into two weeks in mid-March isn't exactly an ideal scenario. If baseball is going to take time off to accommodate international play, why not spread the WBC out over the year and play the championship round over a slightly extended All-Star break?

Getting baseball back into the Olympics isn't going to be easy and in the long run, it may not even be worth it. So why are league officials promising things that are just going to make the teams and maybe even the players upset down the road?