The Korea Baseball Organisation has voted to close down its major league matches during the Olympic Games in the hope of fielding the first all-professional team to play for an Olympic title.
Play will stop in South Korea's major leagues for three weeks after the KBO considered protests from players who did not want to forfeit wages while away from home representing their nation at the Games.
Should South Korea field an all-professional, its medal chances would improve dramatically. Japan, Asia's top team and one of the biggest threats to Cuba in what was an "amateur" Olympic sport, is unlikely to field an all-professional team as many of its top players are employed by US major league teams. The US leagues will not be suspended during the Olympic Games.
The Japanese team in Sydney will, however, include eight players from its major leagues, among them Matsuzaka Daisuke, the Seibu Lions star pitcher, and Nakamura Norihiro, the Kintetsu Buffaloes home-run hitter, from ithe Pacific League. The Central League declined to make its top players available.
Cuba remains favourite to win the Olympic title, the reigning champions unaffected by professional terms and conditions.
US DOES ITS HOMEWORK AT HOMEBUSH
As the nation that likes to think of baseball as its own, the United States has suffered humiliation upon humiliation in Olympic competition at the hands of Cuba and amateur rules. The US intends to change all that in Sydney.
A change in the rulebook has dictated that Major League players are eligible to compete at the Games. However, the demands of the season in the US means that the star names from baseball will not travel to Sydney. Instead, the US will rely on doing its homework at Homebush.
The advance party that arrived at Homebush Bay in Sydney this week includes Bob Watson, the former New York Yankees and Houston Astros general manager,
and Paul Seiler, executive director and chief executive of US Baseball.
On a four-day site inspection, Watson said: "We're here to compete for gold. Tommy Lasorda (team coach) has already given us our marching orders. He said he's not coming 8,000 miles to lose. So, we're going to touch every base, cross every T and dot every I to prepare for possible gold."
