The International Olympic Committee voted in 2005 to give the game the boot, just 13 years after baseball's Olympic debut, citing the sport's doping scandals as well as its reluctance to send its top players to the competition in the middle of its season. Next year's Olympics in Beijing will be baseball's Olympic swan song unless someone comes to its rescue.

Without the Olympics, baseball's chances of growing around the world would be hurt. Cash-strapped national sports ministries tend to fund only those games that reach the quadrennial sports jamboree. Expansion is a critical issue for baseball. While popular in North America, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and pockets of Latin America and the Caribbean, baseball remains on the fringe in much of the rest of the world, including China.

China is "enormously valuable" in the effort to save Olympic baseball, says Mr. Brosnan. "Everyone expects the Beijing Games to be over the top. That will only enhance the Chinese's standing on the Olympic stage."

Ping pong, snooker and gymnastics are also vastly more popular than baseball in China.
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Only between 12 and 16 true baseball diamonds exist in all of China, according to the Chinese Baseball Association, though plenty play the game on makeshift grass fields. While new fields are being built for the Olympics, they will be razed after the Games to make way for a mall.