Dropped from the Summer Games program after Beijing, baseball may have struck out as an Olympic sport but MLB still believes it can hit a home run in China where it has already invested millions trying to tap into 1.3 billion potential baseball fans.The article goes on to talk about baseball's rises and falls in China in the past. It's great that MLB wants to grow the game, but it's funny how much import is suddenly being paid to the olympics. While it's a great place to market the game to foreign countries, and especially China, few americans will even notice what the U.S. team does in Beijing. The olympics seem outdated to me. The amateur nature of the olympic games is no longer of interest to me, and I question most of the results due to the inability to screen for new performance-enhancing drugs.
"The Yankees the Dodgers are among the teams who have already made investments here," said Bob Watson, Major League Baseball's vice-president of on field operations and Team USA general manager.
"Major League Baseball thinks this is an untapped market just like basketball has.
"When you have over a billion people there has to be some people here, who with the proper instruction and development, can play at the professional level.
"The television market is huge. There are more TVs here than there are people in the United States."
Baseball in the olympics means we can check out a few minor league stars to see how they're coming along for the future, but how do we know how good the competition is? Is it a fair trial of their abilities given that they're playing halfway around the world against competition they've likely never seen before? Olympic baseball is a loose structure, and it's not worth the time of fully digesting. It goes away in a month, and it won't return perhaps forever. I'm a rabid baseball fan, but I won't be paying much attention to the sport in Beijing. Will you?
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