One of the common threads in the comments from many of Japan’s top players before spring training was about how much each was motivated by the prospect of trying to win gold on home soil during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
They can still do that, they’ll just be doing it in the 2020 Games held in 2021. That’s a result of the expected, but no less momentous, consensus reached earlier in the week by the International Olympic Committee and the Japanese government that the Tokyo Games will have to be delayed because of the coronavirus crisis.
The decision, unprecedented in times of peace, will have ramifications that will stretch out across the sports world, and baseball won’t be excluded.