TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Wednesday, August 11, 2004

Olympian Task to Find Baseball Coverage on TV

What an exciting tournament we have this Olympiad. Australia, Cuba, Canada, and Japan will try to fend off Taiwan, Greece, the Netherlands, and Italy. Exciting like watching the weightlifters' weigh-in, the Team Handball warm-ups, and the Dressage preliminaries. Exciting like watching black paint dry in a dark room, since it will be nearly impossible to find on American TV.

The selection of these teams is not exactly done with high competitive balance in mind. Greece got an automatic bid because it's the host country. Canada and Cuba made it in via the North American bracket, when both Mexico and the weak US team tanked. Italy and the Netherlands made it in because, absurdly, for international representation Europe had to have two teams. Taiwan and Japan got in on their own hook, and Australia qualified in a bracket that can be called "other".

Let's dismiss the joke teams first. The Greek team is virtually all Americans -- anybody with an "opolos" in his last name who owned his own spikes was eligible for consideration. This really shows what a joke it is to require representation be "regionally" balanced, when only through the tenuous connection of "greek blood" could the host team put a squad together. Peter Angelos, owner of the Baltimore Orioles, was instrumental in making a greek team happen, and more power to him, but it hardly shows our sport off in its best light.

The Netherlands similarly has what may be charitably described as a good pick-up team. I have great hope for the long-term prospects of Dutch baseball, but a serious team is at least a generation away. The Netherlands has one ex-major leaguer, Calvin Maduro, courtesy of its colonial connection to the island of Aruba. (Aruba is kind of an interesting place because it seceeded from an independent country, the Netherlands Antilles, to re-affiliate with its former Imperial masters; I digress a bit but there's some kind of parallel here I can't quite put my finger on.) I love team Netherlands because its coach is Robert Eenhorn, who didn't quite make it up through the Yankees organization but who was a good minor league player. I spoke with him once at the old Albany-Colonie ballpark and he was incredibly friendly. Also, he spoke English better than Brien Taylor did.

Team Italia once was made up primarily of Americans and Canadians with some Italian heritage in their family tree, but has taken more and more players from Italian club teams of late.

Taiwan at least has some of its better professional players on the team, and will probably dominate the loser's bracket. Dodger prospect Ching-Fen Chen is probably the best known name on the team, and probably the only serious threat to another team's pitching.

Cuba might be expected to be the traditional powerhouse, but with so many defections -- and rumored imprisonments -- in recent years, it's extremely hard to figure out what kind of team is going to show up.

Australia's a bit more interesting, with ex-major leaguers Dave Nilsson and Graeme Lloyd heading up the squad. Unfortunately, like Team Canada, it will be missing some of its better younger players, such as Travis Bickley, because their US major league teams won't release them to play in the Olympics. There's some revenge on Tommy Lasorda on the horizon for Jeff Williams. Loyal readers of my work will remember my rant back in 2000 when the Dodgers refused to let Williams, then a Dodger farm hand, play for the Australians while Tommy Lasorda got his pick of the cream of the minors for Team USA. Williams got his career sidetracked with injuries, and being an ashcan reject is now being allowed to represent his country. Good luck to you, mate, I say.

Team Canada is looking like a very good Northern League team, with lots of ex-major leaguers and prospects who are hurt or who washed out early. Justin Morneau was denied a shot at Olympic glory by the Twins, but how can you not like the chances of a team headed by Stubby Clapp?

Japan, to my eye, is the team to beat. They've got many of the best players from the professional ranks. They seem to have a strong pitching staff, lead by Hisashi Iwakuma and the mighty mite lefty Tsuyoshi Wada.

Baseball America's Team Capsules are here.

There's no firm commitment by the NBC Olympic juggernaut to show any particular game save the Championship, and even that will probably be shown only in part and on tape delay. But just in case we get some real games going, here's the actual schedule and the TV schedule as best I can figure out:

August 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22 are the preliminary rounds. It's a round-robin format with two divisions. The semifinals pitting the second place finisher of one division against the top finisher of the other division is a one-game elimination, both games schedued for August 24th. The championship game is August 25th, which should be in the afternoon ET, preceeded by the bronze medal game. The official schedule is here.

TV is another matter. In the US, games are being broadcast on MSNBC (and possibly some on Bravo) and Telemundo. One strongly suspects Telemundo will have better coverage, even without Team Mexico in the mix. Mixed in with other sports, MSNBC tentatively has baseball on the schedule as follows: 8 AM - 1 PM August 24th, 1 AM-7 AM August 25th, 10 AM - 4 PM August 25th on MSNBC/Bravo; 1:30 PM-11 PM August 24th, 3:55 AM-11 PM August 25th (yes, that's the complete time block, but that's as specific as the schedule is right now), and 4:30 - 6:30 AM August 26th on Telemundo.

If you do the math with the time zones, you can conclude the following. No preliminary games seem to be on the schedule. The only times when "live" games are likely to be shown is early morning on August 24th on MSNBC and possibly the championship game on Telemundo on August 25th, which technically ought to start at noon ET.

All this is subject to change, of course, and getting actual broadcast times for actual games from the official websites is pretty much impossible right now. Expect to have to either leave two TV sets on continuously for two days or do a lot of channel flipping and last-minute checking of the listings to find our game in Greece.

If you're adventurous, here's the link for the MSNBC and master TV schedule, and here's the link for Telemundo's linked-in Olympic Baseball coverage (in Spanish).

posted by The Crank 3:29 PM