If the public sentiments shared by Major League Baseball’s biggest stars this summer are any indication, there’s only one place they want to be four years from now: Los Angeles.
With the 2024 Paris Olympics in full tilt, several stars have voiced their support for MLB participation in the 2028 Games.
The latest: New York Yankees star Aaron Judge.
“I’d love to play,” Judge told the New York Post on Wednesday at Yankee Stadium. “If they give us the opportunity — I don’t know what the ruling [is] or [if] anything has come out about that.
“But I’m all in on that.”
Permission has not been granted. When baseball has been staged at the Olympics — it was booted off the slate for the Paris games — rosters have comprised of amateurs, active minor leaguers, or retired major leaguers.
At the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (staged in 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic) Japan defeated the United States to win gold. Players who were on a major league club’s 40-man roster were not eligible to participate. But that could change.
Commissioner Rob Manfred recently invited Casey Wasserman, the chairman of the 2028 Games, to make his pitch on allowing major leaguers to participate. Wasserman’s agency, the Wasserman Media Group, includes a long list of major league clients.
“Maybe the thing that I found most persuasive that Casey is saying is, forget about what’s going to happen with baseball in the Olympics long term because when they’re in Paris, they’re probably not going to build a baseball stadium,” Manfred said. “But when you’re in L.A., you focus on L.A., it is an opportunity that we need to think about.”
Judge is not alone in his support for major leaguers’ participation. Former MVPs Bryce Harper, Christian Yelich, and Shohei Ohtani have already said they want to participate.
The challenges to this are obvious. The Major League Baseball schedule is unrelenting from the start of spring training in February to the end of the World Series in October or November. The potential risk of injuries that comes with adding more games to the calendar — and/or the revenue lost by shortening the 162-game schedule — are no small obstacles.
MLB has allowed players to leave spring training in the past to play in the World Baseball Classic, where the risk of injury is no less present. But the league is a sponsor of the WBC and benefits directly from its stars participating.
Not only does MLB not enjoy the same relationship with the Olympic Games, but it would also have to pause its schedule at midseason – if not in spring training as well, for qualifying events — to allow players to take the time off.
Still, the opportunity is rare. The Summer Olympics haven’t been staged on American soil since Atlanta in 1996. The world’s best baseball players would not have to travel abroad to participate. And the MLB schedule already pauses for four days every July for the All-Star Game; pausing for another week could be enough to allow for a robust Olympic tournament.
The public endorsements from Judge, Ohtani, Harper, Yelich, and others might mean little today. Over time, though, the sentiment could swell among players and fans alike — perhaps enough to convince Manfred to allow MLB players to participate in the Olympics for the first time.
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