I received an e-mail from Josh confirming receipt of the additions to the Life After the Games brochures. He will reach back with edits, as expected. Until then, I continue to go through the hundreds of sport governing bodies that exist worldwide. I am now on to baseball. Much like gridiron football, one might not expect baseball to have a large geographic footprint outside of the Americas and Japan. In reality, many nations in each inhabited continent have a national baseball association. The stories of how the game came to these places are pretty interesting, too. In Tanzania, the sport has grown since a Japanese man introduced it to the locals just a few years ago. It is especially popular within Tanzania’s grade schools (World Baseball Softball Confederation, n.d.).
Baseball will make its return to the Olympics for 2021 in Tokyo, albeit in a six-team format (OlympicTalk, 2020). Meanwhile, Major League Baseball played a series in London in 2019 and was expected to for the recently-completed season until COVID-19 resulted in the scrapping of those plans. I dedicate a post from a previous course to the MLB London Series. The fact that games can be played on an international stage shows that while baseball may not be the world’s most popular sport, there is still great interest in the game. Going through each of the contacts for the sports I have so far has brought about some very interesting information that I would never have guessed if I did not conduct the research. Let this be a lesson to the young people out there that it pays to do your homework.
References
OlympicTalk. (2020, May 12). What Olympic baseball, softball will look like for the first time since 2008, and perhaps the last time. Retrieved from https://olympics.nbcsports.com/2020/05/12/baseball-softball-tokyo-olympics-preview/
World Baseball Softball Confederation. (n.d.). Tanzania Baseball & Softball Association. Retrieved from https://www.wbsc.org/members/253/tan