MLB's refusal to shutdown so the world's best players could participate in the Games was one of the reasons why the International Olympic Committee (IOC) axed baseball along with softball from the Olympic programme after next month's Beijing Games.
"Instead of a three day break for an all-star game, you might end up have a four or five day break and get all the games in some kind of way using major leaguers," said Watson. "It's not too premature to say the minds are turning trying to work things out.
So the IOC kicked out baseball just because the Major Leaguers weren't going to show up? Geez.
Injury concerns aside, this would be a helluva thing to see mid-season. Unlike the World Baseball Thing, these guys would be playing at the top of their game.
We actually did that in Guam - we had an all-star series of games between the two divisions (which we called National League and American League - yet the Tamuning Twins were in the NL and the Agat Cardinals were in the AL) of the Guam Baseball League (formerly the Guam Amateur Baseball League, or GABL) and the winner of the All Star series got to represent Guam in the Mobil Games (the inter-island tournament) or whatever goodwill tour was coming up (we did one to Palau, for instance, in 1995).
My last year, though, 1996, we had so much rain we could never get the series finished - so at my suggestion, the league simply chose the best players from *both* squads, and *they* went to the Philippines.