Believe it or not, the Soviet Union once had a national baseball team. They weren’t exceptional or anything, but they did try to go toe to toe with the United States. Yes, the East vs West, communist vs capitalist clash of civilizations battle carried over to the baseball diamond.
Much has been made of CCCP vs USA in ice hockey, to a lesser extent basketball and of course the Ivan Drago vs Rocky Balboa prize fight that effectively ended the Cold War.
It’s in all the history books, Rocky v. Drago brought military detente and denuclearization, nothing else.
The Soviet Union national baseball team wasn’t long live, but they were the subject of a straight to HBO feature film, starring hard core Chicago Cubs fan Joe Mantegna. Glorious Red Baseball Power is also the subject of the next Let’s Get Weird, Sports podcast on Hammer and Rails.com, part of SB Nation.
So go “back to USSR, you don’t know how lucky you are,” and click that link to listen to our podcast on the history of Soviet Union baseball, on the Spotify, Megaphone and many other platforms. Quit Stalin! Listen to our pod, and “long may our Crimson flag inspire!”
Obviously, the Russians hacked us and made us do a podcast on this topic. So we apologize for all the Soviet Union propaganda, they made us write it.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, the author of “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry,” regularly contributes to WGN TV, Sports Illustrated, Chicago Now and SB Nation.
You can follow Banks, a former writer for Chicago Tribune.com, on Twitter and his cat on Instagram.