Tough job for European teams to qualify for 2020 Olympic baseball tournament

You may all know that baseball may be back on the Olympic agenda in 2020. Organizer of the 2020 Olympics, Japan, has announced to propose baseball as an Olympic sport for 2020.

If the IOC agrees with this proposal only six teams will qualify for the Olympic baseball tournament. Why six? Only to save on the costs. In the previous editions of the Olympic Tournament, there were eight teams.

The WBSC (World Baseball and Softball Confederation) has announced that they want to use the second edition of the Premier 12 tournament as qualifier for the Olympic Games. Tricky thing here is that to participate in the Premier 12, you have to be in the top twelve list of baseball countries. Currently the Dutch team is ranked fifth.

The participating teams can earn most points for the world ranking in the upcoming Premier 12 tournament, later this year.

It is to be expected that the Dutch will send a team with a mix of (high) minor league players and players from the Dutch Hoofdklasse. It remains to be seen if Rick van den Hurk and Wladimir Balentien will participate. So far, there has not been any news on that.

For Italy it will be hard to earn a lot of points this year. The team will mainly contain players from their own competition, the IBL. A lot of the so called Italo-Americans cannot participate because of obligations elsewhere. Italian born Alex Liddi will play in the Mexican Winter league and Brazilian-Italian pitcher Tiago da Silva will play in the Venezuelan winter league. It is doubtful if his club, the Cardenales de Lara, want to let him go. Even several Italian players have announced that they cannot participate because of obligations to their employer.
Because of all these limitations, the Italians do not have many pitchers.

So the upcoming Premier 12 tournament will be the basis for a qualifying possibility for these two European countries to participate in the 2020 Olympics, but it will be far from easy to reach that goal.