Australia national baseball team at the Summer Olympics

The best result achieved was in the 2004 Games in Athens, where Australia lost the gold medal match to Cuba to receive silver.

Though not originally included in the eight team tournament, Australia joined Canada, Chinese Taipei, Japan, the Netherlands, Puerto Rico, South Korea and the United States after Cuba chose to boycott the Games.

Australia became the tenth nation to compete for an Olympic medal in baseball, when they played Cuba in the opening game of their 1996 campaign.

[9] After losing their first two mercy rule shortened games to Cuba and the Netherlands, Australia recorded their first victory against defending bronze-medalists Japan.

Australia won only one of their remaining four games (against South Korea), which included two more mercy-rule losses to the United States and Nicaragua.

Having hosted and won gold in the 1999 Intercontinental Cup ten months prior, with only one loss in the whole competition—including two victories over powerhouse Cuba—there were great expectations for Australia to perform in front of home crowds again in the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

As had been the case in the previous Olympics, Oceania and Africa teams first had to become champions of their respective continents before facing in a deciding series to determine the last of eight spots available.

[10] Australia was scheduled to compete against Guam in the 2004 Oceania Baseball Championship, with the winner advancing to the playoff against South Africa.

Three days before the best-of-five-game series was due to start, Guam withdrew from the tournament, resulting in Australia's win by default.

Olympic baseball operated with a mercy rule that would stop a game after seven (or eight) innings if one team was leading by ten or more runs, making it more difficult to post such large victories.

[15] As the tournament was scheduled for March, many of the players who would have otherwise been selected for the Australian, Canadian, and Mexican teams were unavailable due to commitments in the American Major League system.

[16] A series of exhibition games were scheduled, both to give match practice to the players, and also to serve as selection trials for the tournament itself.