Dear Charlie,

I'm happy to see your push to bring baseball back to the Olympics. Baseball is an important part of the overall sports fabric and a "common love" for many nations. And promotion of the game on the world stage helps all countries that get involved. Just look at the players who participated in the World Baseball Classic that are now in the Major Leagues. Our organization is engaged in baseball diplomacy and development via baseball through a program sponsored by the US Department of State. We are building linkages between youth baseball officials and volunteers in Nicaragua, Venezeula and the Dominican Republic with counterparts in the US with the goal of helping communities run more sustainable programs and to link educational acheivement to sports achievement, providing once-in-a-lifetime experiences for some great community leaders to travel to another country, make friends, share experiences and learn.

One of our volunteer leaders from Nicaragua played in the 1996 games in Atlanta. Just as that experience helped him, he is now helping many more people.

Keep swinging away,

Paul Teeple
International Director, A Ganar/Vencer Program
Partners of the Americas

Hi Charlie,

I am impressed with your passion for baseball and ambition for the sport to be readmitted to the Olympic Games programme.

I wish you every success in gathering support from all relevant stakeholders across the globe. However, from my experiences Baseball needs a strong foundation in a country in order for it grow and develop and this needs a great deal of support from the baseball community.

I spent some time working in Fiji during the South Pacific Games and Baseball was a new sport added to the programme. This required a baseball stadium to be built (as there was not a dedicated baseball diamond in the country) and a minimum of 6 Pacific Island nations to enter. A number of new sports facilities were constructed for these games including hockey, swimming, netball and basketball, however, the baseball field was the first to be converted to a rugby pitch due to lack of use from baseball. Even with some token workshops and school-based coaching sessions it was difficult to sustain the sport at the local level without continued support from regional and national organisations.

From a sports development perspective, I think the answer lies in grassroots participation and that developing baseball at the amateur level would have a greater impact on the sport than adding one more elite competition option whilst there already exists so many professional leagues.

What do you think about this angle Charlie? Do you think the priorities should lie with creating opportunities and pathways for young people to participate in baseball or would young people benefit more from having Olympic role models in Baseball???

Look forward to hearing your perspective.

Best regards,

Jackie Lauff
Free University Berlin
University Challenge

Hi Charlie

Thanks for the entry. I also love baseball and played alot when I was little. I was a little league coach and umpire when I was in highschool. A great sport. I wonder why it is so important for sports to be Olympic Sports. I of course understand the financial value of being an Olympic sport for the sport assoications trying to get funding from national governments, and the prestige of an Olympic Gold medal and so on . What would havine baseball be an Olympic sport mean for players on the ground in a developing nation or in the US? given that profession baseball leagues exist and are well publicised in Japan and the US. What real difference do you see it making? and what for you are the possible negatives of being an olympic sport?

All the best from Berlin

Heather Cameron
Free University Berlin
University Challenge

Charlie, I think you make some compelling points but unfortunately in this day in age sports are business. Owners of MLB franchises are not going to want to allow their players risking injury in a game that will bring them no revenue. We saw after the world baseball classic that many pitchers had a hangover effect from the game and were not as productive the following year. I wish this wasn't the case but maybe things will change in the future.
Jake Ryon

Charlie ,
I respect your passion for Baseball / Softball and can ujnderstand your dissapointment of the sport losing its status of olympic sport. I do not agree that this is the correct forum to launch your re-olymp campaign .... I myself have the same passion about a different sport korfbal, the worlds only truly mixed teamsport. .... and both you and me can probably come up with dozens of sports that deserve beeing olympic if we really try.

Hi Charlie,

Your campaign very much stands out in its ambition, and provides some really interesting insight that I had never considered - espcially that over 126 nations in the world play baseball/softball. This observation makes the case for your campaign quite strong. By reintroducting baseball/softball as an Olympic competition, the sport would most definitely gain a dramatic new level of recognition as a global - not just American - sport. But why is this important? What impact would the recognition of baseball/softball as a worldwide sport, another universal mechanism by which people relate to and interact with one another, have on the world? I think that baseball/softball is very much an additional resource for social change that has often been overlooked, and it would strengthen the vision of your entry if you were to articulate the immense scope of possibilities that this untapped resource has to better the world.

Please share with us these possibilities that would come from Olympic recognition. This is most definitely an exciting campaign! Thank you!

This raises an entirely different application of how sport and societal issues intersect:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/12/sports/BATS.php

A compelling story supporting baseball could be developed using the economic impact on the Caribbean Islands. A possibly morew compelling story would be the succes stories of Caribbean baseball such as Roberto Clemente. Baseball can teach young people motivation, how to work as a team, and charActer building on a very low budget.