ACOG - Baseball - IBM

Spector's Guide to Baseball

The Players

While basketball, beach volleyball, badminton, tennis and most other Olympic sports feature their top professional players at the Games, baseball resisted the temptation to put professionals on the diamond. The International Baseball Association (IBA) voted down a 1994 proposal that would have allowed players from Major League Baseball and other professional leagues to participate in the Games.

However, baseball won't be without its own version of a dream team. In a country where baseball is truly the national pastime, Cuba has assembled a cohesive squad featuring experienced veterans and major-league talent who have elected to remain on the national team rather than seeking opportunities in professional leagues. While Cuba's players remain on the team for many years, other countries such as Japan and the United States revise their rosters annually while selecting their squads from college and youth teams.

The Olympic Game

Olympic baseball is played by the game's traditional rules with only a few exceptions. Teams may use a designated hitter and aluminum bats are legal in Olympic play. A 10-run rule ends the game when one team leads by 10 or more runs at the end of at least seven innings.

To help speed up the game, pitchers cannot take more than 20 seconds before delivering their next pitch. Other rules designed to keep the action moving limit defensive conferences at the pitching mound and require players to remain in the batter's box unless granted a legitimate timeout by the umpire.

In the Olympic tournament, the eight teams play a round-robin schedule with the top four teams advancing to the semifinals. Once in the semifinals, the No. 1 team plays the No. 4 team and the No. 2 team plays the No. 3 team, with the winners advancing to the gold medal game and the losers playing for the bronze medal.

What to Watch

Fans who like offensive baseball should love the Olympic tournament. While pitching remains the key to championship teams, Olympic batters have been the early stars of the tournament after racking up a scorebook full of double-digit run totals in 1992. Led by Cuba's lofty .404 team batting average, four of the eight teams in the first Olympic tournament hit over .300. The offensive trend should continue at the Centennial Olympic Games. Generally considered a hitter's ballpark, Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium could help keep batting averages and run production on the rise.

Coaches will try to counter the offensive onslaught with pitching staffs that have produced such notable major leaguers as Jim Abbott (USA, 1988) and Hideo Nomo (JPN, 1988). Look for fastballs, change-ups, sliders and curves from Japan's Sugiura MASANORI, Korea's CHA Myung-Ju, Cuba's Lazaro VALLE and the United States' Ryan DRESE in their attempts to cool off the hot Olympic bats.

This is an official publication of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games Sports Publication Department. Written by Howard Thomas.


Olympic Factoid
Closing Ceremony of the 1996 Games involved a crew of 2,100 who worked with more than 3,500 performers as well as thousands of athletes who celebrated on the field of Olympic Stadium.