An Olympics expert and historian, David Wallechinsky recently answered some questions for New York Times readers. I don’t want to hold this guy up as an all-knowing, completely even-handed expert (where the Olympics are concerned, no one involved is completely trustworthy), but as you’ll gather from this first question he’s close. The baseball question follows.

Q: How confident are you that the HGH test will actually catch or deter some athletes from cheating this summer in Beijing? –Clay
 

David Wallechinsky: The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is involved in an ongoing competition of its own against drug cheats, and it is hard to tell what they have up their sleeves for Beijing in general and for pre-Games testing in particular.
The topic of doping is sensitive in China. A Chinese publisher once translated my book, “The Complete Book of the Olympics,” into Chinese. The manuscript was ready to go to the printers when they asked if they could delete certain parts of my text. For one thing, from my chart of all the athletes who have ever failed a drug test at the Olympics, they wanted to delete the name of the only Chinese athlete to fail a test — 1992 volleyballer Wu Dan — while retaining the names of athletes from all other countries. My Chinese agent explained to me that although it may be true that Wu Dan tested positive, “certain aspects of the truth have not yet been shared with the Chinese people.” I refused to allow the deletion, and publication was canceled.

And the aforementioned baseball question:

Q: Why were baseball and softball dropped as Olympic sports? Was it due to funding, or were there other reasons? — Alexa
 

DW: Various reasons have been given for dropping baseball and softball from the Olympic program, but I think there is only one that counts: Major League Baseball’s refusal to follow the lead of the National Hockey League in suspending their season so that the best athletes can compete in the Olympics.
With the exception of boxing, the I.O.C. wants the Olympics to showcase the best athletes in the world in each sport. When M.L.B. refused to cooperate, baseball was booted out of the Olympics. In my opinion, M.L.B. has been painfully short-sighted and has lost a golden opportunity to exhibit their sport to parts of the world where it is relatively unknown. Bad call.
As for softball, the case has been made that the United States is so much better than other countries that the sport is not really competitive. However, I believe that softball is simply being punished for the sins of M.L.B.

You can read the rest here. He also thinks Rio de Janeiro is the likely choice for the 2016 games. That’s found in Part 1 of the interview, which is here.