Is it too early for the 2004 Olympics?

Well, I'd have thought so, but all I'm going to do is watch them. So too, apparently, will the U.S. Olympic baseball team, which failed to qualify for the Olympics, by losing to Mexico in a qualifying tournament. As a result, the U.S. team - which had been among the favorites - won't be on hand to defend their gold medal from the 2000 Games.

Pretty odd way to be knocked out: After early rounds of the tournament, which seemed to do nothing but set seeding for the knockout portion of the tournament, wherein the U.S. team won all of its games and outscored its opponents 21-0 while the Mexican team lost all of its games, Mexico advanced in the first-knockout round when its opponents - the Bahamas - failed to show up. And it strikes me as awfully strange to have single-elimination rounds in a tournament that determines qualification to the Olympics. Still, those were the rules, and the U.S. team knew them in advance, so they can't use that as an excuse (and, to their credit, they aren't).

The U.S. team had a good manager (Frank Robinson), and pretty fair players (mostly minor leaguers), and even had prospects of getting Roger Clemens to pitch for them next year. You know, Clemens could have pitched for them in this series.

Still, maybe they'd have been better off just to use the 2003 NCAA champions, whoever that was.