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Baseball on long, rocky road to redemption

The Major League Baseball razzmatazz machine paraded into Beijing this week to announce its arrival on the mainland - all part of the 'baseball diplomacy' to build bridges and 'internationalise' the popular American sport. It might also help get baseball back on the Olympic roster.

Beijing 2008 is the last time it and sister game softball will be played at the ultimate world sporting event. They were voted out by the International Olympic Committee in 2005 - a bitter blow from the blindside that sent the MLB reeling towards the dugout and into further global obscurity.

But the MLB has only itself to blame for the snub. And it knows it. As much as it proclaims to be a world sport, baseball has suffered from conditions that many critics argue prevail throughout US society: insularity and illusions of grandeur.

The game has long believed its large home following, from Miami to Anchorage and the small token South American and East Asian leagues in between, were evidence the world was enchanted by the pitcher and the batter. It wrongly believed sport fans from Auckland to the banks of the Zambezi River excitedly clutched their scorecards like millions of Americans at ballparks each week.

It is only now, after the Olympic snub, that MLB realises that tennis, golf and arguably cricket have more global appeal and followers than baseball.

Cricket more popular, baseball fans might ask? Certainly. The billion-plus cricket-mad Indians outstrip baseball's global fan base alone. And given it's global appeal, cricket, last seen at the Olympics in 1900, is likely to revive its Olympic status before baseball.

Global interest is what sways the IOC members most in their yea or nay votes for a sport's inclusion. So when baseball and softball came up for review, the IOC judges gave the thumbs down.

US baseball fans cried foul, claiming the negative votes were part of an anti-American conspiracy among the reactionary, IOC liberal European intellectuals - all venting spleen on the Bush administration's foreign policy.

Such claims were dismissed. But there is an argument the MLB world view is not dissimilar to the one held by imperial and Maoist China - that the righteous Middle Kingdom lay at the centre of existence, and all who exist outside its borders are but heathen aliens.

Look at the stats. A World Classic should include all that it declares. But the 2006 inaugural World Classic - the brainchild of the MLB - saw only 15 nations pitch against the creator country.

The Cricket World Cup has more competing nations than baseball, with 16 taking part in finals after qualifiers involving 97 teams.

Neither comes close, of course, to the soccer World Cup, the world's game that unites the planet more so than the Olympics.

After it was kicked out, IOC president Jacques Rogge said the message to baseball was loud and clear: The Olympics demands only the best athletes, universality - and clean sport.

Baseball failed on all three counts, the IOC ruled.

And they were right. The Olympics had never beamed brightly on the MLB radar, and had long been viewed as an annoying hazard to be given a wide berth.

For unlike the leading North American basketball and ice hockey organisations, the MLB has always sniffed at the Olympics and refused to interrupt its regular season to let its best players attend. Moreover, it put out a second-rate US team for the Athens 2004 preliminaries - and promptly failed to qualify.

Global appeal is weak. The fan base outside of the US is nominal. For sure, Cuba, Venezuela, Japan and Taiwan produce the odd good player but they and a handful of other batting nations do not constitute 'the world'.

Rampant steroid abuse among some of the MLB's top players ruined any appeal that baseball qualifies under the Olympic clean sport rule. Indeed, as the MLB announced its China roll-out plan this week, a political committee in Washington was reviewing the case of Brian McNamee, the personal trainer who said he injected Roger Clemens, one of the best pitchers the game has seen, with performance-enhancing drugs - just one of the scandals that has tainted the game's wholesome reputation.

However, after two years of humiliation, baseball is starting its global PR campaign anew, and the egotistical parochialism is about to end.

Market forces, TV technology and the rise of soccer and basketball dictate that baseball must 'internationalise' - a new MLB buzzword that really translates as 'conquer China'.

'2008 is a big year for baseball in China,' said Paul Archey, senior vice-president of MLB's international business operations.

On March 15 and 16, the LA Dodgers will play the San Diego Padres in the first professional MLB games on Chinese soil - two exhibition games to entice the Chinese into the glamour and obsessive stats-quoting that go with baseball.

To announce the event, LA Dodgers head coach and former New York Yankees manager Joe Torre and Hall of Fame slugger and San Diego Padres vice-president Dave Winfield, together with Gene Orza, chief operating officer of the MLB Players Association, talked up a good game.

Orza spoke of a new era of 'baseball diplomacy' and even re-worded a famous Chinese saying about big journeys starting with small steps.

Each spoke of a sport full of romance and 'poetry' and dazzling stars - an edifying game that builds wholesome communities as much as does mom's apple pie.

And what with the Chinese youth being the MLB baseball stars of the future, the panel said, they needed to be served some of this US-made, moral sporting goodness.

Indeed, there was so much talk of wholesomeness and children being the future this week, that when seven young boys were wheeled out for the cameras dressed in baseball jerseys to pose with Torre and Winfield, one could be forgiven for thinking the MLB had been making too many consulting visits to Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch.

Was the subliminal message to the IOC along the lines of: 'Oh! See how the children of the world might weep if their beloved baseball is not back in the Olympics by 2016!'? Back in reality, the negative effect of the Olympic rejection has finally hit home.

'We've been working closely with the International Baseball Federation to lobby IOC members and doing things like [these games in China] to show that baseball is truly a global game and worthy of a place at the Olympics,' Archey said.

Baseball diplomacy begins in earnest in March.

The world might not have noticed but the MLB hit more than a home-run this week.

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