Venezuela earthquakes leave youth baseball players injured, orphaned or dead

At Playa Grande stadium in La Guaira, families slept under tarpaulins in the same place children once trained for Criollitos de La Guaira, after the earthquakes killed at least 100 young players enrolled in the league. The stadium, once a field for drills and tryouts, became one of 14 displacement camps set up in the hard-hit coastal state.

The disaster began on June 24, when a magnitude 7.2 quake struck off Venezuela’s northern coast west of Caracas, followed about 39 seconds later by a magnitude 7.5 shock. Caracas, Aragua, Carabobo, Falcón, La Guaira and Miranda took the hardest blows, with homes, hospitals and schools left in rubble and telecommunications, transport, water and electricity systems badly damaged. By July 1, the United Nations said at least 2,295 people had died, 11,256 had been injured and around 6,400 had been rescued, while 51 international search-and-rescue teams from 28 countries were still working in the country. Venezuelan authorities declared seven days of national mourning.

For children, the collapse reached beyond collapsed walls. UNICEF said thousands now needed safe shelter, clean water, healthcare, psychosocial support and family tracing services, warning that children were especially vulnerable to separation from caregivers, injuries from falling debris and trauma that may surface long after the shaking stops. In the quake zone, the loss of young baseball players cut through families, coaches and neighborhood teams that had long served as a source of routine and identity.

Baseball has carried national meaning in Venezuela for generations, and the damage to youth leagues has become a measure of the wider human toll. Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association announced a joint $1 million donation for relief, saying the country’s deep baseball culture made the loss especially painful. The U.S. Department of State said it was deploying a regional Disaster Assistance Response Team and urban search-and-rescue teams, and that the United States was partnering with Global Empowerment Mission and Walmart to move supplies into the country. As rescue teams kept pulling survivors from the wreckage, the children who once filled the diamonds were left counted among the dead, the injured and the missing.