Baseball made its debut as a medal sport in the Olympics on Sunday, 26 July 1992, in Barcelona, Spain. The Opening Ceremony of the Games of the XXV Olympiad took place the day before.
The 1992 Games would set a record number for participating athletes, which has since been eclipsed: 9,356, representing 172 countries or territories, competing in 28 sports and 257 events.
The baseball tournament was an eight-team competition with a round-robin format. Each participating team went through a seven-game group play. The top four teams advanced to the semifinals (number one seed versus number four and number two versus number three). The winners of the semifinals competed in the gold medal game and the losers played for bronze.
The participants represented three continents. Cuba, the USA, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic qualified from the Americas; Japan and Chinese Taipei from Asia; Italy from Europe. Hosts Spain were the second team from Europe.
Cuba earned the first gold medal thanks to a roster loaded with international stars at the top of their careers, such as pitchers Omar Ajete and Orlando El Duque Hernandez, soon to be an MLB World Series winner, infielders German Mesa, Antonio Pacheco and Omar Linares and outfielders Orestes Kindelan and Victor Mesa.
Cuba won the final easily, 11-1, outhitting the Chinese Taipei squad 18 to 4. The Chinese Taipei team was composed of experienced players that were left off the rosters of the recently born Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL)
Third-place Japan sent to Barcelona a mix of semi-pro veterans and young Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) stars in the making such as future home run king Hiroki Kokubo, then a 21-year old, and pitcher Kento Sugiyama, a first-round pick in that year's Amateur Draft.
The USA, lead by Florida State University head coach Ron Fraser, had on their roster a 19-year old Nomar Garciaparra, a 20-year old Jason Varitek and a 21-year old Jason Giambi. They finished fourth.
IOC Session 91 voted baseball a medal sport on 13 October 1986 in Lausanne. The same meeting allowed professional athletes to compete in the Olympics however it left the decision to include them or not up to each IF. The international governing body for baseball at the time, the International Baseball Association (IBA), only approved pros to be included in the Olympics in 1998.
IBA President Robert Smith commented on the subject in WBSC's book The Game We Love: "We thought about it, but then realized we wouldn’t have been ready for 1992. And amongst us, there was a lot of die-hard amateurs."
Before being featured as a medal sport on the programme, baseball had been a demonstration sport at the 1984 Los Angeles Games. The huge success of that tournament was instrumental in the IOC Session vote in 1986.
Juan Antonio Samaranch, the IOC President since 1980, was quoted just after the Games: “The success of baseball in Los Angeles convinced me, baseball can be a medal sport”.
Baseball had been a demonstration sport also at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, Korea.
