Todd Jones - on the radar

With the Detroit bullpen still looking messy at best, it sounds like Kyle Farnsworth is not even in the conversation for closing games at this point. The job is still Fernando Rodney's, and with Joel Zumaya potentially heading for instruction on his curveball, could Todd Jones be back in the picture soon? Jones says he wants the role back when he returns from the DL, and Jim Leyland's latest quote is very Jones-friendly.

"Todd Jones has taken a lot of heat -- and I'm not looking to pick an argument with fans or anybody else -- but it's always easy to see somebody have a good night and say, 'Close with that guy,' " Leyland said. "It doesn't work that way. We're finding that out. ... People realize how tough Todd Jones' job has been, and what a hell of a job that guy has done."

Spitting Seeds wouldn't be surprised if Jones re-inherits the role from Rodney by the end of August.

Field of Dreams: China

MLB will pull out all the stops to get baseball back in the olympics after 2008. Now they're looking forward to a foothold for the sport in China thanks to the Beijing games.

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 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."

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 The olympics seem outdated to me.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.

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?

Bud selective

Bud Selig is choosing to investigate the Manny Ramirez trade.

Bud Selig has ordered an investigation into Manny Ramirez's split with the Boston Red Sox, according to a report in the Boston Globe.

The paper reports a source directly linked to the investigation says Bud Selig has directed Major League Baseball executive vice president Rob Manfred to contact everyone involved in the trade to the Dodgers for individual accounts of how the transaction unfolded.

What's to investigate? Doesn't the commissioner's office have to sign off on these deals in the first place? Selig looks more and more bungling each passing day.