Baseball has been played at the Summer Olympics since 1904 but it wasn’t until 1992 that it was finally granted medal status. Finally, the great American game is an Olympic event. Now kids all over the United States that love to play baseball can dream of an Olympic Gold medal. Now we have two sports that are major international sports, baseball and basketball, and the United States’ ability to play baseball should cast a shadow of superiority over the games that has not been seen since the basketball dream teams started coming in from the United States. So in 1992 it was only logical that the first gold medals given in the Summer Olympics to play baseball were won by the Cubans. Wait, what? Surely the scale would right itself when they went to play baseball in the 1996 Summer Olympics in the American hotbed of baseball, Atlanta. So it was really no surprise when in 1996 the baseball Olympic gold medal went to the Cubans again. This is getting frustrating. Finally in the year 2000 in Sydney, Australia the United States Olympic baseball team won gold as they beat the Cubans. Victory was short lived however as the Athens, Greece 2004 games found that the Cubans once again could play baseball better than the Americans. Fidel Castro is just loving this I am sure.

Americans love to play baseball but there is just something about other countries that bring out the worst in American baseball players. So we turn to our professionals in the 2006 World Baseball Classic that was newly created to bring the game of baseball to more countries and allow other countries that do not normally make it very far in international baseball competition to compete. Surely our Major Leaguers could play this newly created tournament that had the championships scheduled to be played on American soil. Among a field that included teams many had never seen before from countries such as South Africa and the Netherlands the United States was sure to stand as a giant among men. The United States finished in 8th place in the World Baseball Classic and failed to even qualify for the semifinal round as their overall record of 3-3 dropped them down in their pool standings with only Mexico standing between the United States and dead last place.

It is strange for an American to watch our boys of summer get bested by teams from countries like Japan, Cuba, and Korea. After all the Americans taught those countries how to play so how did the student become better than the teacher? Here is something else to consider, when these top players from other parts of the world come to play in American Major League Baseball why do so many of them fail? The really strange thing is that many of these international teams that are beating up on American international baseball are made up of the players that were rejected by American Major League Baseball.

You could make a case that American college baseball, where the players for the Olympic teams come from, is not as advanced as American major league baseball. If you make that case then how do you explain the 2006 World Baseball Classic? Most of the top teams in that tournament were made up of MLB players or rejected MLB players and all of the top teams had just as much preparation time as the other teams did. This was not a case of the Japanese team practicing together for years because many of the Japanese players are fro m American MLB teams and they only had a month or two to practice as a Japanese national team. It is a problem that will haunt Americans until superiority is finally established by American International baseball. Until then Americans can only wait and watch.