About six weeks before the 2025-26 regular season began in the top professional baseball league in Venezuela, one of the best winter leagues in the world, a motorboat was underway on the Caribbean Sea off Venezuela.
According the the U.S. Government, the boat had 11 people on board who were associated with the Venezuela-based criminal gang Tren de Aragua, which was allegedly using the boat to move drugs to the United States.
As the boat moved across the water on Sept. 1, a U.S. missile blasted it apart, leaving wreckage strewn in the water and the 11 people on the boat dead, according to video released by the U.S. military. The strike was the first of more than 20 the United States would launch against boats allegedly trafficking drugs in the waters off Venezuela and Colombia, and part of a campaign that culminated in a midnight raid on Caracas by the U.S. military that captured Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores.
As the missile strikes continued, the the Liga Venezolana de Beisbol Profesional conducted its 56-game regular season while the rhetoric between the U.S. and Venezuela ratcheted up. For years, Venezuelans under contract to Major League Baseball teams in the U.S. and Canada have returned to play in the LVBP, and similarly, MLB teams sent developing prospects to the league to keep working during the off-season.
While fewer and fewer non-Venezuelan prospects have played in the LVBP over the last 15 years as the economic crisis in Venezuela has worsened, it has remained a destination for journeyman players from the U.S. and elsewhere seeking to find work over the winter in hopes of prolonging their career, be it in affiliated baseball in the U.S. or in professional leagues in Asia, Mexico, or elsewhere. That’s enough to get talented players to come to Venezuela to play, despite the economic crisis that has wracked the country for more than a decade.
This year, 16 American-born players played in the LVBP, and for the most part, it was just another season of winter ball, though there is always some wariness.
“I was skeptical. I was very skeptical,” said former Cincinnati Reds pitcher Keyvius Sampson, who has pitched for the Cardenales de Lara each of the past three seasons, when he was first being recruited by the Cardenales for the 2022-23 season. “My first year there, I didn’t leave the hotel room, the hotel period. I went from the hotel to straight to the field and from the field back to the hotel.”
That first season in Venezuela for Sampson was stellar. He made seven appearances and six starts for Lara, throwing 31 innings with a 1.74 ERA. And eventually, he left the hotel.
“One of my teammates, Ildemaro Vargas, he pulled me, we were in the locker room, and he’s like, ‘Hey man, I hear you’re not doing much or nothing,'” Sampson told World Baseball Network from his home in Florida. “I was like, ‘Yeah, bro, I don’t want to chance anything.’ I didn’t take any kind of jewelry, anything over there. And he was like, ‘Listen, you’re good here, man, especially in this city.’ He told me, ‘This is my city. You’re good. People know you.'”
After the pep talk from Vargas, a Major Leaguer who has played the bulk of his 460 games with the Arizona Diamondbacks and has played 12 winter seasons back home in Venezuela, Sampson emerged from the hotel. He and Vargas went out to restaurants in Barquisimeto, the Cardenales’ home city, and Sampson gained confidence in his safety and a better understanding of his team’s city.
“I understand the economic crisis there, but the people there, they were friendly and very welcoming and things like that. And so I started really loving Venezuela,” Sampson said. He’s since returned to play two more seasons in Barquisimeto. “So every time, you know, Cardinales, they call me, I tell them, like, yeah, man, I definitely want to come play winter ball.”
Other American players echoed Sampson’s thoughts on their safety as professional ballplayers in Venezuela. Former Philadelphia Phillies farmhand Andrew Schultz, who pitched for Aguascalientes in the Liga Mexicana de Beisbol last summer planned to pitch in Mexico this winter, but a call from the general manager of the Tigres de Aragua changed his plans.
“Everyone I talked to that had played there or lived there raved about it and said it was a great experience. I definitely was tentative but having all the guys with first hand experience gave me peace with the decision, really glad I ended up going down there,” Schultz told World Baseball Network via instagram. “It was awesome, man. At no point did things ever feel unsafe or out of the ordinary. [It] just felt like playing ball with a group of brothers per usual. It’s a beautiful country.”
For Sampson, who has played in the Chicago White Sox, Arizona Diamondbacks, and San Francisco Giants organizations, as well as South Korea, Taiwan, Mexico, Venezuela, and the independent Atlantic League since his last MLB appearance in 2016, conditions in Venezuela visibly changed as the 2025-26 regular season moved on.
“When you go get gas there, you have a line that’s almost a mile long where people are waiting to get gas. And I was just like, ‘Wow,'” Sampson recounted. “I asked the driver there, I said, ‘Hey, is this always like this?’ And he’s like, ‘For the most part, you know, it is. It’s like this.’ And then I started seeing [the U.S. was] taking their tankers and stuff and, you know, it got worse and worse. And that’s when I kind of started seeing, like, all right, it’s getting a little different over here right now.”
He told World Baseball Network that the Cardenales provided him armed security and a driver while they’re in Barquisimeto. Eventually, though, after hearing from family members that it might be time to leave Venezuela, Sampson went to the general manager and asked to make arrangements to go home to Florida.
His teammates “were joking around like, ‘Oh, Gringo, you’re scared, you’re scared!’ And I was like, ‘No, I’m not scared, but, you know, I have a family I want to get home to regardless of anything happening,'” Sampson said. “And so I had got several texts that night when everything happened, and they were like, ‘Oh my God, man, you were right, you were right!’ And I was like, ‘Hey, man, you know, I just know the president, you know?'”
Less than a week before Christmas, Sampson left Venezuela, flying back through Colombia. And just two weeks later, the U.S. military snatched Maduro from his Caracas compound in that overnight raid that resulted in a four-day suspension of the playoffs. By then, there were just two American players left in the LVBP, Cardenales de Lara pitcher Ronnie Williams and Aguilas del Zulia Zac Grotz.
Williams made 23 appearances in the regular season with the Tigres de Aragua before joining the Cardenales as a reinforcement for the playoffs, and allowed one run on one hit, a solo homer by Aldrem Corredor, the night before Maduro was captured.
Reached by social media the next morning as the world woke up to the news of Maduro’s capture, Williams, rarely seen without a smile when he’s not pitching, told World Baseball Network, “I’m ok. It’s normal here, for now.”
Photo: Keyvius Sampson has pitched each of the last three winter seasons with the Cardenales de Lara of the Liga Venezolana de Beisbol Profesional. (Photo via LVBP.com)
