BY MASAKI MATSUMOTO

The Asian preliminaries for baseball for the Sydney 2000 Summer Olympics were held from August 11 to 17 this year. It was very exciting and was broadcast on TV news programs and written up in newspapers everyday.

The reason for this excitement was that 8 professional baseball players joined the Japanese National Team. They were 5 field players; Ide (Nippon Ham), Nomura (Hiroshima), Hatsushiba (Lotte), Matsunaka (Daiei), Furuta (Yakult), and 3 Pitchers; Kawagoe (Orix), Koike (Kintetsu), Matuzaka (Seibu).

Especially, the genius pitcher Matsuzaka showed his greatness as the starting pitcher against Taiwan on August 15, and by making 13 strikeouts, and allowing only 3 hits for the victory. The highest Japanese baseball skills were shown in that game. For example, there were good signals by the catcher Furuta, and the game winning hit by Heima, who is an amateur player and Matsuzaka's high school senior, and so on.

The reason professional Japanese players were allowed on the team was that South Korea and Taiwan suspended their Professional Baseball League for the preliminaries in order to qualify for the Sydney Olympics. In recent years, the level of baseball in both of those countries has improved, and it is difficult to say which is higher or lower when comparing them with Japan. It would have been difficult for Japan against these teams in the Asian preliminary games with only amateur players. Therefore, professional players joined the national team.

In the Asian preliminaries for the Sydney Olympics, the Japanese National team broke through the first round with overwhelming power, and won the first 2 games, but lost in the final round. As a result of their winning record, Japan will be allowed to participate in the Sydney Olympics. The 1 loss was against South Korea. The starting pitcher for the Japanese Team was a professional player, Koike. The ability and power of the Korean team was superior even with professional players on the Japanese team.

It was the first time for the Taiwanese, South Korean and Japanese professional baseball players to play against one another in a competition. However, the Japanese National Team was made up of not only professional players but also amateur players. China, the Philippines and several countries entered the preliminaries, but most people paid attention to which one of these three countries (Taiwan, South Korea and Japan) would win and be able to join the Sydney Olympics. The final round of 3 preliminary games were broadcast on television in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and several other countries, and Asian people were very excited about the games.

It is common for professional players of sports other than baseball to have a world competition representing their own countries. So baseball fans were excited watching these games. There should be a competition like an Asian baseball playoff series where the winner would compete in a true "World Series." Only in this way can baseball become a world sport.