Baseball’s Best Not Chasing the Gold
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While most Olympic events are a competition among the best, the better you are in baseball, the less of a chance you have of playing for gold.
Major League Baseball did not allow players on 40-man rosters to participate in the six-nation Olympic tournament.
Rosters for the Olympics remain in flux. Israel lost catcher Ryan Lavarnway when the Indians brought him up from Triple-A Columbus in late June after Austin Hedges went on the concussion injured list. Israel manager Eric Holtz, already without Baltimore pitcher Dean Kremer, was hoping to get Lavarnway back because his team's opener against the United States on July 30.
"Our guys are playing all over the place. But it's not like a 162-game season where we have time to work on stuff," Holtz said.
"We've got to put stuff together and basically treat this like a 12-year old travel tournament, right, where it's win or go home."
Host Japan is favored to win. The Central and Pacific leagues are stopping their seasons between July 14 and Aug. 13 for the Olympic tournament, which runs from July 28 to Aug. 7.
While Japan is missing major leaguers, including Los Angeles Angels two-way sensation Shohei Ohtani, San Diego right-hander Yu Darvish and Minnesota right-hander Kenta Maeda, it has far more top-level players than the other five nations.
Masahiro Tanaka, back in Japan with the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles after seven seasons with the New York Yankees, is the only holdover from the 2008 Japan team that lost to the U.S. 8-4 in the bronze medal game.