Barber: Giants players reflect on trouble in Venezuela
SAN FRANCISCO
When you get to a baseball stadium early, you see the wheels of service of motion: concession-stand workers punching clocks, ushers receiving instructions, rolling trays of food weaving through the ballpark’s corridors. It’s uneventful bustle, and you quickly tune it out.
On a recent afternoon at AT&T Park, though, the scene crystallized for Gregor Blanco.
“A couple days ago, I was just walking through the hallway, and you see all the bread that’s there,” the veteran outfielder said last week, during the Giants’ most recent homestand. “In my country, there’s no way that’s there. If you see it, people just grab it because they’re so hungry. Little things like that, I’m like, man, we are so blessed here, being here in the greatest country in the world.”
There was a day when bags of sliced hot dog buns wouldn’t have meant much to Blanco. But his homeland, Venezuela, has fallen into a financial and political crisis so deep that it is beginning to absorb the thoughts of even its most high-profile emigrants.
It’s an especially salient point in Major League Baseball, which is heavily infused with Venezuelan players. According to Baseball Almanac, 112 Venezuelans played for the 30 major-league teams in 2017. Other than the United States, only the Dominican Republic (170) had better representation. Puerto Rico was a very distant third with ?30 players.
The Venezuelan roster includes some of the brightest stars in the game, like Jose Altuve, Felix Hernandez, Miguel Cabrera and Elvis Andrus. It’s safe to say that baseball is more integral to Venezuelan culture than it is here.
I had been hoping to talk to one of the Bay Area’s Venezuelan ballplayers for a while. Specifically, I wanted to talk to Blanco. The reason was simple. Of our four local candidates - the other three are San Francisco third baseman Pablo Sandoval and outfielder Gorkys Hernandez, and Oakland relief pitcher Yusmeiro Petit - Blanco is the most fluent in English. And my Spanish is weak.
I felt awkward when I approached Blanco at his locker. A major-league clubhouse is open for one hour before games. Some players sit and shoot the breeze with teammates. Others get busy watching film or stretching or running in the outfield. Some simply don’t like to be bothered. And here I was, about to ask Blanco to tackle a complex and distressing subject when he’d soon take his turn in the batting cage. I didn’t know how he’d react when I asked if he’d be willing to talk about what’s going on in Venezuela.
This is how he reacted: “I’m really glad you asked me about that. Because I want to make it more visible.”
So we chatted for a while. Blanco was patient and forthright throughout. And after that game, when most reporters had cleared out of the home clubhouse, I spoke to Hernandez, too. We faced more of a language barrier, but he also was receptive to my questions.
I’m going to say some things about Venezuela here. You may know all of it and more. I don’t mean to condescend. But the truth is that Americans have always been really good at not concerning ourselves with the rest of the planet. Even when intentions are good, the attention span rarely keep pace. It’s a measure of our privilege.
You probably know, then, that things are dire in Venezuela. But you may not have absorbed the depth of the problem.
“The little kids are dying,” Blanco said. “Five-, 6-year-old kids, 7-year-old kids, 9-year-old kids, they are looking in the trash cans, eating stuff out of the trash cans. And I’m not talking about really poor people, people living in the streets. But regular persons. They don’t have anything. … Those little kids are actually dying because they don’t have food, they don’t have medicines, they don’t have waters.”
As Hernandez said: “When I was young, we had everything.”
It should be noted that Hernandez, in relative terms, grew up with very little. The son of a single mother, he worked at a car wash as a teenager to help support the family. “We could find food, we could find medicine, everything,” he continued. “We could go to the hospital. Now you can’t find food, you can’t find the medicine. People die because if you go to the hospital, you have nothing to take care of you.”
None of this is hyperbole. Drastic shortages have stricken Venezuela over the past couple of years. Stores run short of staples like soap and toilet paper, and hospitals don’t have enough antibiotics or cancer drugs. Infant mortality rose by 30 percent in 2016. Malaria infections went up 76 percent.
According to a study by the Central University of Venezuela and two other colleges, up to ?90 percent of Venezuelans currently live in poverty. But here’s the number that really gets me: That same university study noted that Venezuelans reported losing an average of 24 pounds in 2017.
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