EXPLAINER: Olympic baseball a throwback to pre-analytics age

YOKOHAMA, Japan (AP) — If the Colorado Rockies were in the Olympics, they'd have had some shorter nights.

Olympic baseball, which started Wednesday, has some notable differences from Major League Baseball.

A biggie is the rout rule, which would have saved some innings for the Rockies. A game is over when a team is losing by at least 10 runs after seven innings. That would have cut short the Colorado's 12-2 win over Philadelphia on April 25, their 12-0 loss to San Francisco the following day and their 13-8 win over Cincinnati on May 13.

The Olympic rout rule was put in place by the World Baseball Softball Confederation for all but medal round games: The final out also has occurred if a team is ahead by 15 runs after five innings.

Olympic baseball is a throwback to the pre-analytics age. MLB Statcast isn't installed, so there is no scrunity of spin rates, exit velocity and launch angle.

“Basically, we had nothing,” American third baseman Todd Frazier said after the Americas qualifying tournament. “We had no video. We had no analytical process. It’s `Here’s your bat. Bring your own stuff.'”

Here are 10 nuggets to compare and contrast.

10. THE BALLS ARE DIFFERENT. Balls are not the major league Rawlings variety, but a WBSC version with slightly different seams. Then again, the WBSC ran out of baseballs at the Americas qualifying tournament in Florida and organizers switched mid-tournament to minor league balls.

9. FASTER IN KILOMETERS. The only metric is truly metric: Pitch speeds are listed on the Yokohama Stadium scoreboard in both miles per hour and kilometers per hour. For those wondering, Jacob deGrom's major league-leading 99.2 mph average velocity sounds even more unhittable at 159.6 kph.

8. WHO'S HERE AND WHO'S NOT. DeGrom, of course, isn't at the Olympics, which...

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