Why isn’t baseball in the Olympics?

Baseball isn’t in the lineup of sports for the 2016 Rio Olympics. Why isn’t it there?

Baseball was unofficially played in the Olympics as early as 1904, but it didn’t become an official sport until 1992. It enjoyed exhibition status without awarding medals until then.

The majority of the IOC’s problem with baseball was the unpredictable length. Differing styles of pitching and hitting led to baseball games being untenable for the stacked style of Olympic coverage, with most sports performing in a back to back to back format. The IOC tested starting runners on 1st and 2nd as soon as extra innings started, but that proved to make the sport even more unpredictable in terms of time.

In August 2009, it was decided that baseball would not be a part of the 2016 Olympics. Timing was one of the things cited, but another angle was the popularity of baseball worldwide. Sports like track and field and soccer are worldwide phenomenons that all countries participate in, and there simply weren’t enough countries to participate.

In 2014, the IOC made another change: the 2020 Olympics would be allowed to resurrect baseball. The Olympics will be headed to Tokyo in 2020, and seeing as how Japan is a big baseball country, there will be a big push to reinstate baseball.

A big obstacle to overcome will be the European countries. Very few of them participate in baseball, and they constitute a big part of the Olympic voting bloc. Since the Summer Olympics are capped at 28 sports, it will be difficult to convince those who do not play the sport to invest in it.

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