Baseball has a rocky Olympics history. First introduced to the Games in 1912, it began as a demonstration-only event, such a poor stepchild to other sports that at first it was played simply as a one-game spectacle by those already involved in other Olympic endeavors. America’s favorite pastime was finally given full status for the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona, only to be banished altogether starting with the 2012 Games in London for a multitude of reasons including concerns about steroid use, a lack of worldwide popularity, the need to cap the number of sports at any given Olympics, and Major League Baseball’s refusal to bend its schedule to allow professional players to take part. But before baseball was sent to Olympic-sports Siberia, Ben Sheets of the Milwaukee Brewers had a spectacular shining moment.
The Milwaukee Brewers drafted Sheets out of Northeast Louisiana University (now called the University of Louisiana–Monroe) in the first round, tenth overall, in 1999. One year later, Big Ben was still mowing down batters in the minor leagues, trying to work his way to the majors, as the 2000 Summer Olympics approached. Although the International Baseball Association had opened the Olympic doors to professional players that year, Major League Baseball did not allow any of its big leaguers to miss that much time, so the US team consisted of minor league talent. In that pool Sheets was considered a star.
“From Day One, we knew if we had one player to build around, if we needed to have somebody who could win the gold medal for us, that player was Ben Sheets,” USA Baseball executive director Paul Seiler said at the time. “We had an ugly group. We didn’t have a Ferrari, but if we had one, it was Sheets.”
The US had never won Olympic baseball gold. They finished fourth in 1992 in Barcelona and took bronze in 1996 in Atlanta. At the 2000 Games, in Sydney, Australia—the third Games in which baseball was a full sport—there was one clear favorite: Cuba, the two-time defending gold medalist, a team that had never lost a single game in the Olympics. Although some considered Cuba’s power to be slipping a bit thanks to many of their top players now competing in the US major leagues, Cuba did return eleven players from the gold-medal squad in Atlanta to try to do it again. Many predicted the United States would finish no better than third.
The twenty-two-year-old Sheets was known as a prankster on the team, a lighthearted guy from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who liked to have fun. But he was absolutely deadly on the mound. Sheets pitched twice in the round robin, beating Japan and Italy each by a score of 4–2. It was also during the round robin that Cuba faltered, getting upset by the Netherlands 4–2 for their first-ever Olympic defeat. Perhaps there was a crack in their armor. Cuba still managed to trounce the US 6–1 when the two met in the preliminaries, a game that featured a hit batter, retaliation in the form of interference, and tension between the two clubs that threatened to boil over into a full-blown fight.
In the semifinals, Cuba blanked Japan 3–0, while Team USA barely made it past Korea, winning 3–2 on a bottom-of-the-ninth home run by Doug Mientkiewicz after a two-hour rain delay. The winning run crossed after midnight, and the players were both spent and exhilarated as they mobbed Mientkiewicz when he stepped on home plate.
“[Sheets] came up to me in all the pandemonium and he said, ‘You just won me a gold medal. You just won us a gold medal,’” Mientkiewicz remembered. Sheets was that confident that the US would prevail in a rematch with their rivals. He would be handed America’s hopes along with the ball for the gold medal game on September 27, 2000. “We had it set up a long time ago that he was going to pitch this game,” manager Tommy Lasorda said after Team USA won gold, “because we knew he was that good.”
One of baseball’s legendary managers, Lasorda had spent twenty seasons with the Los Angeles Dodgers, winning two World Series titles. The seventy-three-year-old took Sheets out to dinner that night before the 7:30 P.M. first pitch. “I said to him, Ben, you’re gonna pitch the biggest game of your life tonight,” Lasorda recalled. “I said, Ben, you are going to go to the major leagues with Milwaukee. I think you’ll even win twenty games. You might even be a Cy Young award winner [best pitcher in baseball], but everybody in America is going to remember you for this game that you’re going to win tonight. And he looked up to me and he said, ‘Who are we playing?’”
Sheets was joking, of course. Every sports fan on the planet knew who was meeting who for the gold medal showdown that evening. Friction rippled in the air, from both the near fight in the last game and each club’s intense desire to put the other in its place. Cuba had beaten the US twenty-five of twenty-eight times they faced each other in previous international tournaments and were 7–0 against the US in the Olympics in previous years.
Yet this game started in Team USA’s favor. Mike Neill blasted a first-inning home run off Cuban starter Pedro Luis Lazo for a 1–0 lead. Sheets took the mound with that edge. He gave up one hit in the bottom of the first but then struck out Cuba’s first baseman looking, and the US held on to the 1–0 advantage after one. People in the stands could feel a momentum surge. This game had an entirely different aura about it than the previous US–Cuba matchup, but there was still a lot of baseball to play. In the second inning, Lazo surrendered a double to US designated hitter John Cotton, and Cuba’s manager had already seen enough. Lazo was yanked.
From that moment forward, Sheets delivered near perfection. He would yield just two more hits the entire game while walking no one. His command was impeccable, and his fastball reached 98 miles an hour. He rarely went deep into the count and had thrown just 25 pitches after three innings. Sheets struck out five, but most importantly, he did not allow a single run. The defense behind him was sublime, too, with every player at the height of concentration and discipline. The US pushed across three more runs in the fifth inning and held a 4–0 lead heading into the ninth.
“The way Sheets was pitching,” US leadoff hitter and second baseman Brent Abernathy said after the game, “There was no team in the world that was going to score four runs off of him. To do what he did at his age against that team is just unbelievable.”
Ben Sheets pitched a complete-game, three-hit shutout for the gold medal. AP PHOTO/ELAINE THOMPSON
Sheets struck out the first two batters in the ninth. Cuba was down to its final out. The third and final hitter whacked it to left field. As Ben whipped around to watch, and the eyes of thousands of spectators followed, left fielder Mike Neill slid to his right and made a snow-cone grab, barely holding on with the tip of his glove, to end the game. It was a complete-game, three-hit shutout; Sheets had needed just 103 pitches to dispatch the world’s powerhouse baseball team. The final score: 4–0. Ben had been right in his confident assertion that the US would win gold.
As Neill held on, just barely, to the final out, Lasorda was watching eagerly from the dugout. He threw his arms into the air, while on the mound Sheets instinctively sank to his knees with relief and joy, his arms also rising to the skies.
Ben bellowed several loud and guttural whooos and was just getting back to his feet when his teammates descended on him in chaos. They had beaten the mighty Cubans to establish a new world superhero in baseball. Lasorda and his assistants rushed out to join the others. Lasorda was wearing a microphone for television and could clearly be heard saying, “We did it, we did it! We came for the gold and we got it!” to anyone and everyone within earshot. Then Lasorda pulled Sheets in close for a bear hug and gushed, “Atta boy, Ben. You did great!” Emotion choked his voice.
Brewers catcher Dave Nilsson also competed at the 2000 Olympics, playing for his native Australia. He had an excellent individual performance as a catcher and designated hitter, leading all Olympic players that year in hitting and slugging percentage, but Australia’s record was just 2–5 in its home Olympics. Four years later, Nilsson made a repeat showing for the Aussies. This time they took home silver, losing the gold-medal game to Cuba, who had bounced back from their defeat in Sydney to ascend again to the top of the baseball world.
The team took laps on the field holding American flags, then briefly retired to the clubhouse to change into their USA sweat suits for the medals ceremony on the field. Tears streaked many of their faces as the flag was raised and the familiar strains of the national anthem echoed from the stadium speakers. They were not embarrassed to cry. There had never been a better moment to do so.
Lasorda and the other coaches were not given medals, which in all Olympic sports are reserved for athletes. After Lasorda watched the team he had gotten to know so well being honored with the highest award there is in sports, he said, “I got my gold medal when I saw them put the medal around their necks. I got my medal when I saw them raise that flag. I got my gold medal when they played the national anthem.”
As Sheets wrote his name in Olympic lore that night, the team that had drafted him could not have been happier. “He has a burning desire to be a major league player,” Milwaukee Brewers farm director Greg Riddoch said at the time. “He rose to the occasion in the biggest game of his life. That tells you all you need to know.”
Unfortunately, Sheets’s career never lived up to the potential Lasorda had seen. Ben made his major league debut for Milwaukee less than seven months later, on April 5, 2001. He pitched eight seasons for the Brewers but never won more than thirteen games and was plagued by shoulder and elbow injuries throughout his time in baseball. He made the all-star team four times, but the closest he came to the Cy Young Award was eighth in voting in 2004. Eventually, the elbow required what’s known as Tommy John surgery, replacing a ligament with a tendon from another part of the body. Sheets left the Brewers for free agency in 2008. He finished his career with one year each in Oakland and Atlanta, where he won just four games for each club.
Ben Sheets retired from baseball in 2012. He and his wife have two sons, and Ben became a volunteer assistant baseball coach at his alma mater, the University of Louisiana–Monroe. He was inducted into the Brewers Wall of Honor in 2014 for pitching more than 1,000 innings.
Ben Sheets’s career may not have unfolded the way he would have liked, but he will always have that gold medal and the respect of the nation for what he did on a September night in Sydney, Australia, when the underdog toppled the favorite and left American spectators in chills. No other US baseball team made it to a gold medal game after that. The best they could do was a bronze in 2008, and then baseball was removed from the Olympic calendar, leaving Sheets’s heroics all the more indelible.