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 :)