Baseball at the 2008 Summer Olympics
| Baseball at the Games of the XXIX Olympiad
|
||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Pictogram used to identify baseball at the 2008 Games
|
||||||||||
| Venue | Wukesong Baseball Field | |||||||||
| Dates | August 13–23 | |||||||||
| Teams | 8 | |||||||||
| Medalists | ||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
 South Korea
|
|
|---|---|---|
|
 Cuba
|
|
|
 United States
|
Baseball at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing was held from August 13 to August 23. All games were played at Wukesong Baseball Field, a temporary venue constructed at the Beijing Wukesong Culture & Sports Center. Olympic baseball is competed by men only, while women compete in the similar sport of softball.
This is the most recently contested baseball tournament in Olympic history, as the International Olympic Committee voted to remove baseball from the program in the 2012 Olympics. Along with softball, baseball was rejected for inclusion in the 2016 Summer Olympics at the IOC's meeting in October 2009. However, following a 2016 IOC vote, baseball will again be conducted for the 2020 Games.
This was also the first time that the IBAF's new extra-innings rule was officially in effect, allowing each team to start with two base runners from the 11th inning on.South Korea won the gold medal in a 3–2 final victory against Cuba.
Eight teams are competing in the Olympic baseball tournament, and the competition consists of two rounds. The preliminary round follows a round robin format, where each of the teams plays all the other teams once. Following this, the top four teams advance to a single elimination round culminating in the bronze and gold medal games.
^1 Chinese Taipei is the official IOC designation for the state officially referred to as the Republic of China (ROC), commonly known as Taiwan.
...
Wikipedia