Word: cuban
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...Felix Savon had not already convinced you that a Cuban can throw a punch with the best of them, you must have missed Round 2 of the set-to between the Baltimore Orioles and Fidel Castro's Caribbean fiefdom...
...imagine the thought that crept into Fidel Castro's mind sometime last year: "I would like for Cuba to play baseball against the great New York Yankees!" Except of course that would be embarrassing, since the Yankees are paying quite a bit of money to the Cuban defector Orlando Hernandez. And so the thought became "I would like for Cuba to play baseball against the great Baltimore Orioles!" And on March 28 it was so, when an Orioles team featuring some of the highest-priced talent in the bigs went down to Havana and became the first Major League Baseball...
...rematch tonight in Baltimore's Camden Yards could be ugly, and not for the boys from Havana. The Cubans, national pride pulsing through their veins, are playing to even the series and have added several Major League-quality hitters to their roster, while the Orioles have rather messily imploded this season. In fact, the joke around Baltimore is that the only smart business decision team owner Peter Angelos has made this year is bringing the Cubans to town, hoping perhaps that the game could prove to be an entry point into the Cuban talent pool, which by some estimates contains...
...have two competing waves, one in the shape of a hammer and sickle and the other resembling the face of Alan Greenspan. That way, at least the fans wouldn't have to put on a gag when they walk into Camden Yards. As it is, the Orioles and the Cuban government seem to want to promote "contact" and "dialogue" between the two nations without the citizens of either actually speaking to one another...
...real problem here is that the Cuban government isn't willing to accept the consequences of playing an away game. When they're the home team, you play on their home turf. Any baseball team that crumples under fan heckling isn't strong enough to play the game. If Castro thinks his baseball team is tough enough to beat the Orioles, maybe they're tough enough to hear what the fans have...