Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Baseball and Cuba -- two hidebound institutions needing reform -- get a public relations boost from an extra-innings game in the Havana sunshine.
Mar 29, 1999 | HAVANA -- All the background details of Sunday's groundbreaking baseball game between the Baltimore Orioles and a squad of top Cubans had been painstakingly negotiated beforehand, but advance work takes you only so far. No one knew just how it would be when each team paraded out onto the infield at Havana's Estadio Latinoamerica before the game, U.S. and Cuban flags lifted high in the air before them.
That sense of suspense, and the 40 years that had passed since a major-league team played in Cuba, helped explain the sense of gravity and wonder. A crowd of 50,000 mostly hand-picked Cubans stood reverently for the playing of the Cuban national anthem and then remained ramrod still for the Star Spangled Banner, that world-famous symbol of the historic enemy to the north. This was true even of Cuban President Fidel Castro, decked out in his usual fatigues, there in the front row flanked by baseball commissioner Bud Selig -- himself the embattled leader of an institution in need of modernization and reform -- and Orioles owner Peter Angelos, who has wrangled with Selig in the past.
Castro "stood very straight and paid his respects, as I did during the Cuban anthem," Angelos said just in front of his waiting limousine after the Orioles had come back to win the game, 3-2, in 11 innings. "That was great, it made the trip worth it right there. That's what we were looking for, that sort of camaraderie."
Major League Baseball may need Cuba almost as much as Cuba needed Major League Baseball. The new emphasis on internationalizing the game is no idle impulse. This year's baseball season opens next Sunday with a game in Monterrey, Mexico, between the Colorado Rockies and the San Diego Padres. Baseball knows that it can't sit back after one comeback season, the glorious summer of McGwire and Sosa. It knows that arrogance and complacency are what got it into trouble in the first place, and it knows more labor troubles could be on the way after the 2001 season. So it has to do everything it can to nourish itself by taking chances and trying to find new fans.
The game in Cuba was a step in the right direction, for baseball and for Cuba. As much as the Orioles players who were whisked into town for less than a day talked about this being "just a ballgame," there was no denying the emotion during pregame ceremonies. The U.S. national anthem has played in Havana before, of course, during visits of college teams and at amateur events. But since no major-league ballclub had played in Havana in so long, Sunday's gathering on a steamy afternoon had an air of potential significance that was lost on no one.
I have covered far too many sporting events in the United States during which the anthem is a meaningless ritual, and I thought I'd never again feel that gulp-back-the-emotion disorientation I felt as a kid visiting the Baltimore fort where Francis Scott Key penned the song. But standing only a few dozen rows behind Castro and his green fatigue cap and listening to the ballpark's ancient speakers ringing with what sounded like a recording of a recording of a recording, it felt good to be thrilled to hear a celebration of America, even on a day when fighting in the Balkans was escalating half a world away. (Poor Cuba -- it has been pushed off the international stage twice in 15 months, once when the Monica Lewinsky story broke the week of the pope's visit, and now, with war in the Balkans taking top billing in international news.) But even Cubans used to railing against American imperialism sounded hopeful about the future.
"We showed we can play at the same level as the best teams," said Cuban third baseman Omar Linares. He's the biggest star in Cuban baseball, and a darling of Castro's regime, and it was as if the game was following a Communist Party script when Linares rolled a two-out single through the left side to tie the game 2-2 in the eighth, cranking up the suspense until Harold Baines finally put the Orioles ahead with a run-scoring single in the top of the 11th.
"Our baseball is strong," Linares said. "I think this game might help our two nations have a better understanding of each other. We need this game to occur every year. We can beat them when we play them again."
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