What's This About MY BOYS the Tampa Bay Rays Playing In Cuba

So yeah, I'm a bit of a sports nut.

So yeah, I'm from the Tampa Bay area and I root for my homeboys. GO BUCS! GO BOLTS! GO... uh, we don't have a basketball team. Oh, and GO RAYS!

So yeah, I'm a little stoked that my baseball team THE TAMPA BAY RAYS are going to travel to Cuba this week and play an exhibition game against the Cuban National team. It's the first trip since 1999 by a major league franchise to the country that produces a ton of pro-caliber baseball talent and yet due to our political divisions we have no official contact with them.

But this trip is a little different. This time the Rays are playing to a Cuban crowd at a time our American-set sanctions are lifting one by one to free up travel and communication between the U.S. and Cuba. The relationship between our two nations have been at their best ever since 1960.

And this is a huge game because President Barack Obama - the President whose foreign policy efforts toward diplomacy allowed this thaw to occur, the President who has bucked forty-plus years of hardline policy that never resolved matters - will be in attendance. Obama is traveling to Cuba this week as part of an attempt to further open relations, make more arrangements and deals to bring to an end more than five decades of Cold-War hostility between two nations separated by 90 miles of Caribbean waters.

What will it be like for the Rays to be there during a potentially historic week? A week where Obama could finalize deals with Cuba to establish open elections, end the arrests of political dissidents, normalize business ties and resolve reparations of lost properties from the 1950s? Where Obama could bring back to DC a major peace treaty that even the most hardline obstructionist Republican Senators know they can't shut down without killing themselves?

Okay, maybe that doesn't all happen. But isn't it pretty to think so?

The game is going to be on Tuesday March 22 during the afternoon, I gotta work that day but I'm going to do what I can to listen in or view via the Intertubes.

This is an historic event.

I hope the Rays win.