In the US it was taken as an anti-American swipe, a ridiculing gesture by a European dominated sporting world that either could not or would not understand. It was inconceivable, they said, but it happened nonetheless. Over the summer the members of the International Olympic Committee came together and decided baseball and softball did not deserve a place on the Olympic programme.
The grieving sports went through the usual phases of denial, shock, anger, guilt, depression. But acceptance hasn't come yet. On the contrary, a battle plan is being hatched, to be put into action this week, with the hope being they can slip the games back on to the catalogue before most of the world even realised they had been wiped off.
At a vote in Singapore in July all 28 existing Olympic sports were put to a simple majority vote to decide if they were worthy of a place at the London games in 2012. Twenty-six sports pulled through, including modern pentathlon, which was thought to have been on very thin ice. But baseball lost out 54-50, while softball fell by the narrowest of margins: 52-52 - becoming the first two sports to be eliminated from the Olympic programme since polo in 1936.
Five sports - squash, karate, rugby sevens, golf and roller sports - all failed to get a two-thirds majority needed for acceptance as new sports. The next scheduled vote is in 2009 for the 2016 games, and the IOC has suggested that a simple majority vote will be used across the board to give non-Olympic sports an equal opportunity.
But this week, as the IOC gathers in Turin for the winter games, baseball and softball are hoping for a second chance. They need one-third of the gathered members to submit a motion for a new vote on their status. Half the members would need to agree and then a majority vote would reinstate them.
Baseball may be the stuff folk tales are built on in the US, and produce legends in countries like Cuba, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, but the sport has long been sniffed at in Olympic circles. For one, the games have never appeared to register on Major League Baseball's list of priorities. MLB, unlike the basketball and ice hockey associations, refuses to interrupt its regular season to let its best players attend the Olympics, and the second-rate US team that entered the preliminaries last time around didn't even qualify for Athens. The sport also takes flak for failing to combat rampant steroid use among some of its top players, and for the fact it is not widely played or promoted in many parts of the world.
After it was kicked out the IOC's president Jacques Rogge said the message was clear: The IOC wants the best athletes, universality and clean sport.