Alden Gonzalez
Multiple Authors
MIAMI — Early Sunday morning, in the afterglow of a monumental victory for both his team and his country, Team Venezuela manager Omar López grabbed a baseball cap adorned with the No. 58 and placed it on the dais inside LoanDepot Park’s interview room. Fifty-eight is the international code to reach Venezuela from the United States. It was a reminder.
“If you know someone in Venezuela, call them,” López said. “Tell them that Venezuela is in the Olympics and in the semifinals of the World Baseball Classic.”
In front of a favorable sold-out crowd, in the U.S. city with the highest concentration of native Venezuelans, López’s players had knocked off defending champion Samurai Japan and accomplished two firsts for the nation’s baseball team — qualifying for the Olympics and reaching the semifinals of the WBC, where they will confront the undefeated Italians on Monday night.
That they did it this year added a little extra weight to it all.
“Baseball is beautiful,” Venezuelan infielder Eugenio Suárez said in Spanish. “Baseball is a sport that unites. I feel like this has brought happiness to our country, which it desperately needs and deserves. To have a united public, watching us every day in this World Baseball Classic, yelling and supporting us in these games — it’s really special.”
Venezuela has been in political turmoil ever since the United States launched a military strike to capture its president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, on Jan. 3. While some are hopeful for Venezuela’s future, it has also divided the nation on what should come next. And it has further prevented Venezuelans in the United States from traveling back home to see their families.
For many of the Venezuelans who made up the 34,548 fans in attendance as Saturday night spilled into Sunday morning, baseball is providing them with a connection to what they’ve left behind.
“We needed this,” Yorjelles Marino, a 30-year-old who makes her home in Orlando, Florida, said moments after Venezuela pulled off its 8-5 victory over Japan. “It’s like we’re home — all of us, united. It’s beyond our wildest dreams.”
Marino left Venezuela two years ago, but the rest of her family still lives there. She does not know when she’ll see them again. Armando Marcano, a 39-year-old who has been living in Miami for the last four years, is in the same situation. He arrived when the gates opened at LoanDepot Park three hours before the quarterfinal’s first pitch, bringing along his daughter, cousin and several other family members. They all wore Venezuela jerseys.
“Sports unites us,” Marcano said in Spanish. “It helps us forget about a lot of the political stuff, a lot of the tragedies. This is what brings us together.”
Team Venezuela’s players began their quarterfinal matchup by coming together in the middle of their dugout, the start of a pregame tradition for this tournament. Relief pitcher Eduard Bazardo banged on drums, a staple in his home town of Barlovento, while the rest of his teammates clapped to the rhythm of his beat. Ronald Acuña Jr., Luis Arráez, Wilyer Abreu and Gleyber Torres all took their turns dancing in a circle of teammates, then brought the party outside.
Acuña started it off, belting Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s second pitch to right-center for an opposite-field home run. Torres added an RBI double in the second. After Japan strung together a four-run third inning off Ranger Suárez, Maikel Garcia connected with a two-run homer to trim Venezuela’s deficit to one. It was erased completely the following inning, when Abreu turned on a 2-1 fastball up in the zone and launched it 409 feet into the second deck.
In that moment, as Abreu flung his bat into the air and his teammates spilled onto the field to celebrate with him, Daniel Pérez was making his way up the concourse and banging his own set of drums with four of his friends. A crowd swelled around them everywhere they went, clogging the concourse with spontaneous revelry.
“To us,” Pérez said, “this is everything. It’s a little piece of Venezuela.”
Pérez and his friends began serenading their nation’s baseball team during the last WBC in 2023, when Venezuela was knocked out by the U.S. in the quarterfinals. When the team reached that stage three years later, Pérez’s drumbeats helped to drown out a heavy Japanese contingent in attendance, making it feel as if the ballpark were filled with Venezuelans.
In the aftermath of the capture of Maduro, the Venezuelan winter league ceased play for four days. Air space closed for nearly four weeks. Teams scrambled to get their Venezuelan players into the United States as quickly as possible, worried for their safety and their ability to secure visas for spring training.
Venezuela’s baseball team has done its best to shield itself from politics. Players won’t address the regime change, telling ESPN they are fearful they might put their friends and family members in danger for speaking out. López, who as the manager is the team’s most front-facing member, became so uncomfortable by the line of questioning at the start of this tournament that he began a news conference on March 7 by urging media members to put the topic aside.
“Please,” López said then, “don’t ask me any more questions about the political situation of my country.”
Their hope is the games will be enough.
López expressed as much seven days later, while celebrating the greatest victory in Venezuelan baseball history.
“I’m doing this for free,” he said. “I’m not getting paid to manage my team. But my country right now, it’s celebrating. It’s extremely happy. It’s on the streets. They’re drinking right now, and that makes me happy. Because that’s the only thing that I can do. That’s the only thing that I can do for my country — try to manage a team with a lot of people behind to make my country happy and celebrate. And right now they’re celebrating. And I hope we have two more games. We can celebrate the entire country for about a week.”
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