Baseball’s return to the Summer Olympics will be delayed and so too will Erik Kratz‘s chances to represent the United States (and the New York Yankees) on the diamond.
Following the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, the International Olympic Committee elected to remove baseball and softball from their list of medal-eligible sports. The widely discussed reasoning centered on MLB’s refusal to allow their star players to participate — a fair argument considering the Summer Olympics take place during the heart of the regular season; shutting down the league for two weeks would be no small task.