Baseball fans will have to wait a bit longer for the sport’s return to the Olympic stage after Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced Tuesday that there would be a postponement of the Tokyo Olympics to no later than the summer of 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The decision came after some nations had announced in recent days that they would not send a delegation to Tokyo out of fear for the health of their athletes.

“In light of the current conditions and for all the athletes, we made a proposal of a postponement of about a year, to hold them securely and safely,” Abe said Tuesday during a conference call with reporters.

The IOC and the Tokyo 2020 Organising Committee also released a joint statement:

“The unprecedented and unpredictable spread of the outbreak has seen the situation in the rest of the world deteriorating. Yesterday, the director general of the World Health Organization [WHO], Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that the COVID-19 pandemic is 'accelerating.' There are more than 375,000 cases now recorded worldwide and in nearly every country, and their number is growing by the hour.

“In the present circumstances and based on the information provided by the WHO today, the IOC president [Thomas Bach] and the prime minister of Japan have concluded that the Games of the XXXII Olympiad in Tokyo must be rescheduled to a date beyond 2020 but not later than summer 2021, to safeguard the health of the athletes, everybody involved in the Olympic Games and the international community.

“The leaders agreed that the Olympic Games in Tokyo could stand as a beacon of hope to the world during these troubled times and that the Olympic flame could become the light at the end of the tunnel in which the world finds itself at present. Therefore, it was agreed that the Olympic flame will stay in Japan. It was also agreed that the Games will keep the name Olympic and Paralympic Games Tokyo 2020.”

Baseball was set to return as an Olympic event this summer for the first time since 2008, primarily due to its tremendous popularity in the host country.