Baseball and its closest relative, softball, return to the world stage in Tokyo: praise be.

Baseball and softball return to the Summer Olympics in 2020. From the standpoint of the Right off the Bat Project, irony of ironies, these sports had been voted out of the 2012 London Olympics.

In our book, Martin and I discuss the history of baseball/softball as Olympic spectacles. Baseball was commissioned an unofficial sport in 1900, was played in Paris in 1904, and surfaced at the notorious 1936 Berlin Games, where the largest crowd (to the present) to see a baseball game, some 120,000 largely baffled Bewunderers, witnessed one of the first night games of significance. In 1964, a throng of 114,000 undoubtedly more appreciative fans rooted in Tokyo. Baseball became an official Olympic sport in 1992, but was inexplicably dropped…as it turns out for well more than a generation.

For anyone assuming a U.S. cakewalk comes this startling fact: Cuba has won three Gold Medals, the U.S. and South Korean National Teams have come away with one apiece. Unlike the WBC, which in 2017 commences March 17 (spring training—but hold your complacency: this may be its last), the Summer Olympics, of course, is scheduled during the heat of the pennant races. Most of the best North and South American players would be largely unavailable.

More or less on the subject of foresight and its own closest relative, eyesight, those often-hooted-eyesight-challenged-impersonal guardians of the rules, baseball umpires, are (one at least is) even taking on unruly fans. For the first time in memory, an umpire ejected a fan from a major-league game. Who said the umpires are out of control?