Live baseball returns to British TV screens this week with two games to watch.<\/p>\n
ESPN in the States starts to cover a few Spring Training games once we get to the latter stages of the Cactus and Grapefruit Leagues. On Monday, they are broadcasting a game between the Boston Red Sox and St Louis Cardinals and BT Sport\/ESPN in the UK will be picking up the feed with coverage starting at 17.00.<\/p>\n
The Red Sox are scheduled to send plenty of ‘name’ players to the game, including starting pitcher Clay Buchholz. He has been a frustrating figure for Red Sox fans in recent seasons by mixing occasional brilliance with more regular rubbish. Spring Training stats don’t count for much, so we shouldn’t put too much emphasis on him allowing 6 walks in 5.1 spring innings so far, but it would be encouraging to see him hitting his spots and generally starting to gain some sharpness as the regular season approaches.<\/p>\n
Fine tuning is what spring training is all about and so you could consider the games as a whole to be relatively meaningless.<\/p>\n
That will not be true for the live game on Tuesday. The Tampa Bay Rays’ trip to Havana to play the Cuban national team is absolutely packed full with meaning, much greater than a mere game of baseball.<\/p>\n
President Obama’s visit to Cuba is gaining headlines across the world and it is fitting that a baseball game is part of the overall occasion. Whilst baseball may be referred to as ‘America’s National Pastime’, it has long been an engrained part of Cuban culture.<\/p>\n
The political situation between the two countries has meant that Cuban players have had to defect from their homeland, often taking great risks in doing so such as in Orlando ‘El Duque’ Hernandez’s fabled boat trip, to play in the Major Leagues. Current Yankees pitcher Aroldis Chapman famously scarpered from a Rotterdam hotel in 2009 whilst his team was competing in the World Port Tournament, unfortunately for me just a couple of days before I got there to take in some games.<\/p>\n