Here you go.

Halt. Halt. Nothing personal word of the day is halt as in what Bryce Harper wants

Major League Baseball to do during the 2021 season so that major leagueers may participate

in the now delayed 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics.

Let's give some background into what Bryce is talking about and why in my opinion it's

never going to happen. I want to tell you about the conversations we've had with in

baseball about our participation in the Olympics. We worked extremely hard as an industry not

to have baseball removed but baseball has not been a part of the Olympics and now it was

coming back for 2020. One of the biggest issues if not the biggest issue was Major League

Baseball's unwillingness to allow big league players to go play in the summer Olympics.

But in this era of patriotism as we get through a global pandemic it seems that more players

seem to have an interest in things patriotic. But let's talk about the reality of what

it means to play in the Olympics and what baseball did to try to get an international

footprint and whether or not it's worked and whether or not there is a change that

could be made. Baseball started something called the World Baseball Classic. The World

Baseball Classic is an international tournament that is played during March during spring

training for Major League Baseball. It's played every four years with the exception of the

second World Baseball Classic which happened three years after the first. I'm very familiar

with this because the Marlins have hosted the World Baseball Classic and had some of the

great games in Marlins Park in pro player stadium watching the Dominican Republic watching

Venezuela, the United States. What was going on behind the scenes before the World Baseball

Classic is not often talked about and what was going on was an amazing tug of war between

...