Remembering the Orioles' trip to Havana and what's happened since

This week's exhibition game in Havana between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Cuban National Team is another example of baseball being used as a positive step forward in the thaw of diplomatic relations between the United States and the island nation.

During much of the media coverage of Tuesday's game, it was noted that the last Major League Baseball team to play in Cuba was the Orioles, who traveled to Havana for the first game in a home-and-home series with the Cuban National Team 17 year ago.

Though it took 17 years for a resumption of the baseball rivalry between the two nations where the sport is king, Orioles executive vice president John Angelos told Dave Zirin of The Nation this week that baseball continues to play a small role in a much bigger picture in the normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba and long-awaited advancements in the island nation.

"While our series was and will be unprecedented, the credit for the groundbreaking nature of today's game and of our series many years ago should properly be assigned to those individuals in both the U.S. and in Cuba who long before the historic baseball games of 1999 advocated without success and without pause for the normalization of relations that has finally arrived and for an end to the toxic embargo and travel ban that hopefully will be discarded in short order as well and did so at a time when such sentiments were far less popular than they are today," Angelos said.

Monday, March 28, marks the anniversary of the 1999 game at Havana's Estadio Latinoamericano, where the Orioles prevailed 3-2 in 11 innings on a tiebreaking RBI single by Harold Baines. Jesse Orosco got the final three outs in a game that featured future major leaguer Jose Contreras pitching eight innings of two-hit shutout relief for Cuba.

Tickets to the game were distributed by invitation only, though the crowd included 100 school children from Baltimore and Washington, D.C., who had traveled to Cuba as guests of Orioles managing partner Peter G. Angelos on a chartered plane.The baseball-crazy kids from the U.S. had played ball with their Cuban counterparts.

MASN color analyst Mike Bordick was a part of the Orioles team that traveled to Havana. Last year, after President Barack Obama had announced plans to normalize relations with Cuba and the Orioles expressed interest in returning to Havana for another game, Bordick recalled his excitement at being able to play in Cuba representing the U.S. and Major League Baseball.

"Just hearing all the stories about Cuban baseball, thinking that this was going to be pretty intense," Bordick remembered thinking. "I never had the opportunity to play in winter ball, so it was a great experience for me personally to see a little bit of that culture and their passion for the game. I think most players kind of looked at it that way, just an opportunity to see how other cultures played baseball. And they certainly proved to be a great opponent, and now you see a lot of Cuban players playing in the major leagues."

The Cuban National Team came to Baltimore about six weeks later, turning Camden Yards into a festive celebration of the sport even though rain delayed the start of the game by almost an hour. Cuba won 12-6 before a crowd of 47,940, with third baseman Omar Linares and shortstop Daniel Castro notching four hits apiece to pace an 18-hit attack and designated hitter Andy Morales hitting a home run.

Read The Nation's article in its entirety, which includes more quotes from Angelos, here.