The Baker University baseball team will play the Croatian National team at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. The Croatian team is gearing up for the European qualifying rounds for the 2010 Olympics.

Head coach Phil Hannon said the Wildcat team is excited for the opportunity to participate in such a rare event.

“We want to have a good time with the game and concentrate on the game of baseball,” he said.

Hannon said the decision to play the game was made to promote Baker University and Sauder Field. He said evaluating his players isn’t going to be the main goal of the game.

“We’ve only had a week of practices so the biggest thing is conditioning,” he said.

Pitcher Phil Jordan said the team is excited about playing such a talented team in the fall.

“I think it’s good to play someone in the fall,” he said. “It gets us better for the spring. It breaks the repetition of practice and makes it easier to come together as a team.”

The Croatian team will head to Barcelona, Spain, after games against Baker and the University of Kansas to begin the qualification rounds for the 2010 Olympics held in Vancouver, Canada.

The team has two pitchers who were a part of the Major League Baseball Academy in Italy for the last three years. The academy consists of forty European players under the age of 18, who are selected through tryouts by major league scouts.