Wednesday, March 11, 2015

MLB Exhibition Games inside Cuba May be Closer than You Think


When President Barack Obama announced that the United States government and the Cuban government would begin talks and actions to eliminate the embargo and improve diplomatic relations between the two countries the baseball community went into a frenzy. Major League Baseball, more than the NFL, the NBA, or any other sport combined sees more Cuban defectors come to the United States to play their game so many around the league, fans and owners alike, wondered what this could mean to the game. One interesting change and addition that could come of it could be having spring training games, exhibition games or even regular season games inside the country of Cuba. These changes were thought to be many years down the road but after Rob Manfred talked to the United State government about playing exhibition games in Cuba we may be closer than we originally thought.

Of course Manfred would be a fool to speculate on a time frame for this to happen, and apparently he isn’t a fool because he refused to specify a time frame when asked about the subject, the MLB Commissioner seems to be really pushing for this to happen. Why wouldn’t he? There was 25 Cuban born players in the major leagues last season including Yasiel Puig, Yoenis Cespedes and the American League Rookie of the Year Jose Abreu.


This wouldn’t be the first time MLB visited Cuba as the Baltimore Orioles played the Cuban national team in Havana in March of 1999 and major league teams visited Cuba a lot before Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959. Major League Baseball has hosted exhibition games in Panama and Mexico City while playing regular season games in Puerto Rico, Tokyo, Monterrey, Mexico, San Juan and Sydney just in the past 15 years ad with Cuba a mere 90 miles from the tip of Florida we may be adding Cuba to that already pretty impressive list very, very soon. 

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Sorry for the Capatcha... Blame the Russians :)