Baseball
The United States, which had barely missed medalling in the first official Olympic baseball tournament, tried again in 1996. This time, they were successful. In the preliminary round, they defeated six of their seven opponents, losing only to the undefeated Cubans. The Americans were second place in the round, pitting them in a semifinal match against the third-place Japanese team. In a game much more reminiscent of the Japanese victory in the 1992 bronze medal game than the American win in the 1996 preliminary round, the United States was defeated and found itself playing in their second bronze medal game in as many Olympiads. This time, however, they defeated Nicaragua to win their first baseball medal.
Men's Team Competition:
- United States (7-2) — Bronze Medal
Read more about this topic: United States At The 1996 Summer Olympics
Famous quotes containing the word baseball:
“The talk shows are stuffed full of sufferers who have regained their health—congressmen who suffered through a serious spell of boozing and skirt-chasing, White House aides who were stricken cruelly with overweening ambition, movie stars and baseball players who came down with acute cases of wanting to trash hotel rooms while under the influence of recreational drugs. Most of them have found God, or at least a publisher.”
—Calvin Trillin (b. 1935)
“It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“Baseball is the religion that worships the obvious and gives thanks that things are exactly as they seem. Instead of celebrating mysteries, baseball rejoices in the absence of mysteries and trusts that, if we watch what is laid before our eyes, down to the last detail, we will cultivate the gift of seeing things as they really are.”
—Thomas Boswell, U.S. sports journalist. “The Church of Baseball,” Baseball: An Illustrated History, ed. Geoffrey C. Ward, Knopf (1994)