They played baseball today

They played baseball in Havana today.

That's not really that unusual. They play a lot of baseball in Havana and other parts of Cuba, and have for a very long time.

The unusual part is who the "they" in question was: the Tampa Bay Rays.

Yep, the Rays, who probably don't even qualify as the Greater Tampa Bay Area's Team (that would probably be the stinking New York Yankees) represented Major League Baseball in an exhibition game against the Cuban National Team in Havana's Estadio Latinoamericano. For the record, the Rays won 4-1 (and yes, the game was preceded by a minute of silence for the victims of the terrorist attacks in Brussels earlier in the day).

While I expressed a few weeks ago a general aversion to the blending of politics and sports (whether it be politicians pronouncing football "soft" or racists baiting high school athletes with the name of said politician, or much larger cases such as the Olympics being hosted by a country that turned around and invaded its neighbor a week or two later), and I hold to that opinion. Things get different, however, in the realm of diplomacy and sports.

It's been around for quite a while. If you've ever paid attention to the quadrennial World Baseball Classic and wondered how some of those European countries have any kind of baseball tradition at all, you can thank the quasi-diplomatic efforts of the US after World War II. Japan was introduced to the game even before that war. In my lifetime one of the first examples of US-China exchange in the 1970s, paving the way for Nixon to go to China, was a visit to China by the US's international table-tennis team, an event immortalized by the term "ping-pong diplomacy." In 1988 the NBA's Atlanta Hawks made a trip to the Soviet Union (as it still was at the time), at a time in which tensions between countries were running fairly high (before the Iron Curtain started to fall).

And of course there was a previous baseball excursion to Cuba. In 1999 the Baltimore Orioles traveled to Havana for a game against the Cuban National Team, an event reciprocated by a rematch in Baltimore later that summer. That was a rather different affair, much more a private effort of Orioles owner Peter Angelos than any kind of concerted diplomatic affair.

Not this time. Baseball and diplomacy were deployed hand-in-hand, or perhaps hand-in-glove.

Both President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry were at the game, along with a retinue of other diplomats, following up on recent moves towards the normalization of relations between the two countries. (They were able to stay at an American embassy in Havana, something that didn't exist in 1999.) Cuban President Castro was also there, apparently caught on camera in a half-hearted attempt at "the wave" during the game. Major League Baseball also brought along plenty of its own heavy hitters (so to speak), including commissioner Rob Manfred, former Yankees manager Joe Torre and shortstop Derek Jeter, and Cuban-born longtime Red Sox pitcher Luis Tiant, who threw out one of the ceremonial first pitches along with a long-time Cuban star.

The Rays were chosen late last year for the trip from among a number of MLB teams who expressed interest, reportedly including the Los Angeles Dodgers and Boston Red Sox (both of whom have Cuban defectors on their rosters, the infamous Yasiel Puig for the Dodgers and Rusney Castillo for the Red Sox). This followed a visit to the island by several MLB players including Puig and Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw last fall.

The diplomats and MLB each had their own aims for this trip. While the US leadership was seeking both to advance relations and push Cuba away from the general repressiveness of the regime, MLB was interested in loosening the strictures that cause Cuban baseball players to undergo dangerous and unsanctioned journeys out of Cuba in order to play in MLB.

One such player, Dayron Varona, was with the Rays for this trip. Varona is an interesting case. Unlike more famous players such as Puig or Yoennis Cespedes of the New York Mets, Varona hasn't exactly hit it big in MLB. He's in the Rays' camp this spring as a non-roster invitee, and hasn't played above Class AA ball in the US. He's not very likely to make the Rays' roster this year, although he could gain a mid-season promotion if he does well in the minors.

Had it been up to the Rays' leadership Varona might not have made the trip. The choice to bring Varona along (and to have him in the starting lineup) was apparently instigated by Rays players, according to their manager Kevin Cash. Even the usual starting right fielder, Steven Souza Jr., was apparently o.k. with the move.

The Rays, I think, turned out to be an interesting and inspired choice for the trip. They are one of the youngest teams in MLB, both chronologically (they only began play in 1998, a year before the Orioles' Cuba trip) and in terms of roster and even leadership, both on the field (Cash is the youngest manager in MLB) and front office, where owner Stu Sternberg isn't that old himself. It's hard not to wonder how much that influcenced the Rays' apparent eager embrace of the trip, well beyond the usual public-relations work of holding a baseball clinic for kids in Havana.  Maybe a team of older players with longer memories of US-Cuba conflict might have been less eager to get into the trip. If reports are at all accurate it seems MLB might have hit the jackpot when the Rays got selected from that random drawing.

Of course, the game is over now, and the Rays back to Port Charlotte for the rest of spring training. What happens from here? Who knows? Presumably diplomatic initiatives will continue, whether in such public fashion or more quietly. People who oppose any contact with Cuba will continue to make those noises, without any explanation of why doing the same thing that hasn't dislodged the Castro regime for fifty years is suddenly going to work now (or for that matter why China should not be similarly ostracized), simply expecting the world to remain hostage to their grievances. Probably some players will continue to defect from Cuba in the meantime, as long as the economic embargo remains in place (since the Cuban league is an arm of the state and all players are under contract to it, an MLB team can't sign a Cuban player without some cut of the pay going to the Cuban government, thus violating the embargo).

Meanwhile, MLB may continue to work towards more involvement in youth baseball in Cuba, and I'd be very surprised if another team doesn't make the trip to Havana during next year's spring training. There may well be another goodwill trip with more MLB players, possibly including other Cuban defectors, this next off-season.

For myself, in this case, maybe a baseball game was a means toward a hopeful end. If it might help two nations get to the point where they hate each other a little less, I'd say that's a good thing. I have a feeling some people disagree. I don't want those people in my life. If some enmity in the world can be reduced, that seems like a Christlike thing to do.

And if a ballgame can help towards that end, so much the better.

And frankly, given the other events of the day, a hopeful baseball game sounds even better.

Dayron Varona of the Rays is embraced by family members upon his return to Cuba.