GUARACARUMBO, Venezuela (AP) — The wind picks up dirt as clouds roll over an abandoned baseball stadium at the foot of the mountain range that separates Venezuela’s coastal communities from the capital, Caracas. Young players exchange high fives and hugs, regardless of the uniforms they wear, as well as tears for the friends who are able to train and those who cannot.
The soft face of shortstop Yeferson Seijas hardens when he catches a ball and throws it with the speed and precision for which he is known. He does it again, and again, and again, creating a near rhythmic pop-whoosh, pop-whoosh, as the ball hits his mitted left hand and his right immediately sends it back in the air. No hesitation betrays the emotional storm he is confronting after two powerful earthquakes on June 24 wiped out his home state of La Guaira.
Yeferson, who is only 12, has lost more than most people do in a lifetime. Yet, despite the calamity, he counts himself lucky to be alive. Boys he grew up playing with, or against, are injured, orphaned, dead or missing. Some, like Yeferson, lived in public housing apartments and aspired — realistically, according to coaches — to turn their lives around through a Major League Baseball contract.
“I want to provide for my family,” Yeferson said. “I want to buy my mom a house.”
The earthquakes made his dream ever more pressing. Yeferson, his parents and five siblings are living in a makeshift tent in a fly-infested neighborhood baseball field, about 2 miles (3.2 km) north of the stadium. They are among the roughly 18,000 people classified as homeless by Venezuela’s government following the disaster.
A lost debit card saves a young player
Yeferson and the dozens of other children who are among the roughly 500 people living in the field-turned-shelter in Playa Grande cannot escape their new reality.
Rows of tents, tarps, mattresses and portable toilets on the field remind them of the homes they lost. Beyond the field, flattened and heavily damaged buildings remind them of those they lost. Children now know the smell of death. Some talk of June 24 with tears, others with nervous smiles.
That evening, Yeferson and a friend had just walked into a bakery when they realized they had dropped a debit card. They were retracing their steps to try to find it when the ground began to violently shake. In a matter of seconds, the bakery they had just left was gone.
Simultaneously, the floor of his family’s apartment gave out. His parents and siblings managed to escape, even as the stairs began to disintegrate. They heard the gas explosion that engulfed nearby apartments. Anthony Seijas eventually found his son in the street.
They lost it all. Appliances, furniture, electronics, shoes, street clothes, uniforms, bats, mitts, trophies. All gone.
Even without power or cellphone signal, news spread about which players and parents were injured or dead.
“He has cried a lot,” Yeferson’s mother Elisabeth Pacheco said. “He has been very sad.”
Baseball provides hope for many Venezuelans without means
Baseball is part of Venezuela’s national fabric, especially in La Guaira, the state hardest hit by the earthquakes, and is closely linked to the country’s most valuable resource: oil.
U.S. energy companies popularized baseball in the early 20th century, partly by building playing fields in oil-producing areas that boosted the sport among working class Venezuelans and turned the country into an incubator for major league stars.
Miguel Cabrera, Felix Hernández, Omar Vizquel, Andrés Galarraga, José Altuve and Bob Abreu took their first steps in Venezuelan youth leagues, and Venezuela beat the United States this year to win the World Baseball Classic for the first time.
About 40,000 children and teenagers participate in baseball leagues nationwide, but that's less than half the number who registered in 2005. Participation plummeted due to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the country’s protracted crisis, which pushed millions into poverty and drove more than 7.7 million people to migrate. The leagues are primarily funded by parents and local businesses.
Many players return to the leagues year after year until they age out. Around the age of 12, the really good ones join academies where their lives revolve around baseball and scouts check them out. The exceptional ones aim for spots in MLB-affiliated academies in the Dominican Republic or on professional team rosters in the U.S. or Venezuela. Players can turn pro at 16, and elite prospects get signing bonuses worth millions.
The road to a professional contract is expensive, and kids from poor neighborhoods like Yeferson often rely on financial backers who spot the potential for future reward should the boys become successful. Among those lost in the June earthquakes was Yeferson's backer, who also owned his team.
At the abandoned baseball stadium in Guaracarumbo, trainer Franklin Longa points at Yeferson and two other boys who he and other longtime trainers think could be MLB stars. Longa would have pointed at a fourth kid, but that boy is recovering from injuries suffered when he and his parents were trapped under a collapsed building. His parents did not survive.
“It hurts us all to the core. It’s truly very sad,” said Longa, who once trained Maikel García, who plays for the Kansas City Royals, and Atlanta Braves outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr. “That Wednesday, when this tragedy happened, we had an event scheduled but due to natural causes — it rained — we couldn’t go ahead. And well, in the evening, this disaster hit, leaving us devastated and with our hearts broken.”
Yeferson’s life has been shaped by Venezuela's complex crisis
Like millions of poor Venezuelan families, Yeferson’s was once attracted to the economic improvement promises made by the ruling party in the 2000s. Their faithful support of the self-described socialist government earned them the ultimate reward: a home.
But loyalty could not feed the parents and six children a decade ago, when the economy fell apart and food became scarce. The family of eight left for Peru, where the adults worked and the children went to school, until their lives were disrupted again. Seijas said a neighborhood ruling party organizer was threatening to reassign their home to another family.
With the pandemic still raging, they hopped on a repatriation flight to keep their home — the one that collapsed last month.
The Seijas do not know how long they will have to live in the makeshift shelter nor where Yeferson will practice and play in the future. Maybe an academy will scoop him up, or a league in a state not affected by the earthquakes will make space for him?
In the abandoned stadium, for a moment at least, neither he nor the other players seem to care. The rain soaking the dusty field forces them to run for cover, laughing and teasing each other as they cram inside the dugout.
“United, we are stronger,” reads Yeferson's jersey.
