6 westword.com WESTWORD APRIL 3-9, 2025 | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Field of Dreams VENEZUELAN LITTLE LEAGUE TEAM SWINGS FOR THE FENCES IN DENVER. BY BENNITO L. KELT Y Despite a rain cloud closing in from behind Sloan’s Lake, Edgar Ramos and his coaches handle Saturday’s training of Team Venezu- ela like they have all the time in the world. Kneeling down to instruct kids eye-to-eye and taking easy swings with fungos to send practice ground balls toward the infi eld- ers, they punctuate every instruction with “¡Duro!” or “¡Vamos!” ¨ “¡Rapido, rapido, vamos! Fast, fast, let’s go!” Ramos yells as they scoop up ground balls and throw them to where he stands at fi rst base. “¡Cogela, cogela, duro! Pick it up, pick it up, hard!” he shouts to the next infi elder in line to fi eld ground balls hit by fellow coach Yianco Ramon Garcia. Behind Garcia, Ramos’s other coach, Julian Alexandar Lara, is replacing a ball on a tee for fi ve-year-old Maylob Quevedo. After he sets the ball, Lara points to the center of the baseball and instructs the boy to hit it “¡Allí pero duro! There but hard!” Quevedo takes a swing but shows some hesitation in his follow-through, so Lara tells him, “¡No lo pares, duro! Don’t stop it, hard!” Another swing, and Quevedo hits it on the mark but not hard enough. “¡Así pero duro!” Lara says. Meanwhile, Ramos is hollering instruc- tions to throw to fi rst base. “¡A primera, a primera!” he says. Garcia starts hitting grounders toward the kids at third base so that they can practice their throws to second, and Ramos switches his instructions: “¡A segunda, a segunda, vamos!” The drill changes so that the youngest kids in the group start hitting underhanded pitches from Ramos toward the older kids practicing in the infi eld. When seven-year- old Joaquin Pereda’s aluminum bat rings with hard contact, mothers in the crowd yell “¡Eso!”, their cries encouraging. There you go! That’s how you do it! “¡Ni es mi hijo! That’s not even my kid!” Génesis Lemus gleefully admits to other mothers laughing around her. Ramos’s team comprises about thirty kids between the ages of four and twelve who immigrated just a year or two ago from Venezuela; a few more came from Cuba and Peru. They keep practicing three times a week for games that they hope will come. Because despite Team Venezuela winning the Lil Bombers League championship with the Altitude All Sports program in Novem- ber, Ramos couldn’t fi nd a league for his team this spring, so it has no games scheduled. Even though Ramos is hopeful he’ll fi nd a league, right now, the kids are just practicing for the love of the game. “Baseball is the number one sport in Venezuela,” Ramos says. “When you’re born, they gift you a baseball glove or a bat.” In Venezuela, baseball is big. It’s con- sidered the country’s national sport, and there’s been a national league similar to Ma- jor League Baseball since 1945 that’s even attracted professional U.S. baseball players. Meanwhile, more than 400 Venezuelans have played with MLB teams — no surprise to American baseball fans who know about leg- ends like Miguel Cabrera, Luis Aparicio and Colorado Rockies legend Andres Galarraga. Dozens of Venezuelans are currently playing in the MLB, including Rockies all- star shortstop Ezquiel Tovar, who visited Team Venezuela last November. Ramos knows Tovar’s cousin and invited him to visit; he brought gloves, bats, hats and shirts that Ramos had been hoping to use for his team uniform, but their Little League season was about to end. “It’s a sport that I practiced all the time when I was a kid, too,” recalls Hernan Pereda, the father of Joaquin. “The sport that pretty much every Venezuelan plays as a kid is baseball.” Nine-year-old Melvin Soto Montilla joined Ramos’ team at the end of March. He arrived in Denver a year and half ago from Valencia, a large lakeside city in the Venezuelan state of Carabobo that’s sepa- rated from the Caribbean Sea by mountains. He remembers playing baseball there while he was in school. In the United States, he’s noticed that baseballs are easier to come by than they were at home, where they often had to make baseballs out of mud. “In Venezuela, they didn’t have that many baseballs,” Soto Montilla remembers. “We would grab pebbles of mud and roll them up with glue so that we could use them as balls when we put them in the sun.” His nine-year-old teammate, Ricardo Velázquez, who came from the coastal city of Barcelona in the Venezuelan state of An- zoátegui, has similar memories of mud base- balls. They were made from a natural glue in the trees, not the type they used in school. “There are trees that have a glue,” Ve- lázquez explains. “Venezuelans would take a little, put it in the ground, mix it and grab a tiny, tiny bit to make a little ball.” “The bat was a boom handle,” recalls Mai- kelys Lopez, the mother of one of the players. For a ball, Lemus adds, they would sometimes use a “chapa,” or the cap of a glass bottle. Kids in Venezuela spent most of their free time out in the streets playing, at times “without shoes, without a jersey, until sun- set,” Ramos remembers. “In Venezuela, they’re always going out and playing on in the street,” he says. “You don’t stay in the apartment. Your mom and dad are in the house, and you’re out in the street, playing.” The baseball games that kids played in the Venezuelan streets didn’t last nine innings; they lasted until “your mom yelled from the window ‘come eat!,’ or until someone broke a window. Then everybody would start run- ning away and the game is over,” Ramos adds. A Game Without Borders Venezuelans started leaving their country after the death of President Hugo Chavez in 2013, as the economy tanked under Chavez’s successor, President Nicolas Maduro, who is still in power. Maduro also scared away citi- zens by imprisoning innocent civilians and retaliating against activists who protested his dictatorship. Many of those Venezuelans wound up in Denver. In the 28 months since Denver declared an emergency in December 2022 in response to the infl ux, about 43,000 mi- grants have arrived in the city, mostly from Venezuela and mostly after being bussed from the southern border of Texas. The Venezuelans brought their love of baseball with them, Ramos says. Ramos is from the small town of Tucupido in the interior state of Guárico in the Venezu- elan lowland, but he worked as a merchant marine. He fl ed his NEWS continued on page 8 KEEP UP ON DENVER NEWS AT WESTWORD.COM/NEWS Team Venezuela is looking for a league and an offi cial place to practice. BENNITO L. KELT Y
