Aldo Notari, 73, Champion of Olympic Baseball

Aldo Notari, who died Tuesday at 73, was the long-serving head of the International Baseball Federation, IBAF, the organization that oversees the World Baseball Classic tournament and lobbied, unsuccessfully last winter to retain baseball as an Olympic sport.A diehard baseball enthusiast since his days as a second baseman for the Parma, Italy. Angels, Notari headed several organizations that foster baseball in places most Americans don’t even know it is played, including Russia, Bulgaria, and Ukraine. He also ran the Italian Baseball and Softball Federation, and served as president of the Parma Angels, one of the country’s most celebrated teams. (Bologna is currently in first place in the nine-team Italian League.)Notari played 17 seasons for Parma, and was present when the first professional game in Italy was played, in 1948.While Notari was president of the club, it won four Italian League titles and six European Champions’ Cups. He left Parma when he was named president of IBAF in 1993.It was a heady time for baseball as an international sport. Cuba had just won the first-ever gold medal in baseball, at the 1992 Barcelona Olympiad. Baseball had frequently been a demonstration sport — first in 1904 in St. Louis, notably in 1936 in Berlin, where the crowd of 125,000 that witnessed it still stands as the largest ever to see a game. That it had been accepted as a full-fledged Olympic sport marked the end of decades of lobbying.But dissent sprang up almost immediately, most significantly because the players union refused to interrupt the American baseball season so that players could come to the Olympics, normally held in mid-August, when pennant races are just beginning to get underway. Despite Notari’s concerted efforts, the International Olympic Committee voted last February to drop baseball and softball from the Olympics, starting in 2012. It was the first sport to be dropped from the Olympic roster since 1936, when polo was delisted.In a high-profile success, Notari oversaw the development of a restructured version of the Baseball World Cup, which eventually became the World Baseball Classic. The first was played last spring. When American officials considered barring the Cuban team from playing, Notari threatened to pull IBAF’s sanction from the tournament. After much hullabaloo, Cuba was allowed to compete and ended up losing to Japan in the final at San Diego, 10-6.Italian baseball and softball teams will hold a minute of silence before games this weekend in memory of Notari, the national federation announced.

Aldo Notari, 73, Champion of Olympic Baseball

Aldo Notari, 73, Champion of Olympic Baseball

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