e play a high-level brand of baseball in Australia, something my opponent — himself a contributing writer to this magazine — couldn't accept. His mistake was in assuming that baseball could not possibly be played at that high standard unless it was the result of a full-time, professional competition.

Australia, with only around 18.9 million people at the time, has never had the population to support a full-time professional league. It was apparently useless to point out Australia’s gold medal winning performance in the Intercontinental Cup that very same year, wherein we defeated Cuba, Korea, Japan, and the USA among others. The fact that Australia was subsequently defeated 12-1 by the USA at the Sydney 2000 Olympics only served to reaffirm that erroneous belief. I personally maintain that it was only the enormous depth of talent in the USA team that finally defeated us, not our own inability to match their general standard.

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