World Baseball Classic: Ronald Acuña Jr. and Maikel Garcia, cousins from a small seaside town, deliver Venezuela all the way to the final

· Yahoo Sports

MIAMI — Some 3,000 souls live in La Sabana, Venezuela, a quaint seaside fishing village 65 miles east of Caracas. 

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The speck on the map has two schools, one hospital and, of course, a ballfield. Home plate at the recently renovated Estadio Oscar Santiago Escobar is less than 400 yards — or about five long tosses from one of the area’s major-league baseball players — from the beach. In dead-center field, the fence juts in dramatically to avoid a graveyard, resulting in one of the more bizarrely shaped diamonds you’ll ever see. 

It’s a beautiful place in a beautiful place.

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This field, this community, has raised and molded a disproportionate number of professional ballplayers, some of whom are part of the same extended family. Eight big leaguers have come from this town of 3,000, and that’s the result of much more than random chance. It’s about baseball in the blood and in the bloodlines. And on Monday, nearly 1,400 miles from home, two of those proud Sabaneros, cousins Ronald Acuña Jr. and Maikel Garcia, propelled their country to its biggest win ever on the international stage. 

With a trip to the World Baseball Classic title game on the line, Venezuela bested a Cinderella Italy squad 4-2 behind a rousing seventh-inning comeback led by Acuña and Garcia. The win earned Venezuela a ticket to the nation’s first WBC final. They will take on a massively favored USA team at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday.

Admittedly, it was a slow build of a semifinal. The middle innings slogged and dragged. Both offenses struggled to land a knockout. But thanks to the pride of La Sabana, the final act was well worth the wait. 

“Buonasera,” Acuña joked in Italian as he sat down for his postgame media conference. A good evening, indeed.

Down a run in the top of the seventh with two outs and runners on the corners, Acuña hacked at a first-pitch sinker from Italy pitcher Michael Lorenzen. The well-struck grounder skipped toward the right of shortstop Sam Antonacci, who slid to a knee, backhanded the ball and came up firing toward first. The speedy Acuña, with two surgically repaired ACLs, beat the throw by a step-and-a-half to tie the game. 

Upon hitting the bag, the five-time All-Star broke into a celebratory high-step and continued bounding down the line another 90 feet as his teammates streamed onto the field. The predominantly Venezuelan crowd at loanDepot Park in Miami — attendance 35,382, or 10 times the population of La Sabana — roared to life.

Next Garcia strode to the plate and continued the party, lofting a 2-0 heater into left field to score Jackson Chourio and give Venezuela a lead it wouldn’t relinquish.

Acuña, upon sliding into third, rose to his knees and pounded his chest. From first base, Garcia leaned back and howled toward the heavens. Every Venezuelan in the building was yelling. A waterfall of sound streamed down from above.

“When we play together in WBC, it is a great feeling for us and for our family,” Garcia said after the game, seated next to his cousin. “We enjoy every time we're playing together in winter ball and in the WBC. It’s amazing.”

For Acuña, a former MVP and baseball household name, it was another trademark moment in a career already full of them. For his younger cousin, an underrated Kansas City Royals cornerstone coming off a breakout 2025, it was more evidence of a well-earned ascension to borderline stardom. Garcia has been in the mix of everything for Venezuela in this WBC and now leads the tournament with 10 hits. 

“He's just incredible. He's a great teammate,” Italy first baseman and Garcia’s Royals teammate Vinnie Pasquantino gushed before the game. “He's an unbelievable player. You call it a breakout. I just call it Maikel being Maikel.”

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Garcia was, statistically speaking, one of the best all-around players in major-league baseball last season. He finished the campaign with 16 homers, 23 steals, an .800 OPS and splendid defense at the hot corner. That showing scored him a $57.5 million extension that will keep him alongside Bobby Witt Jr. in Kansas City for the next five years. 

But while he’s only just becoming known to ballfans in the states, Garcia has been a fixture in the Venezuelan Winter League for some time, playing for Tiburones de La Guiara, often alongside his cousin. Those high-pressure games have built Garcia’s reputation as a particularly clutch player, something he further solidified on Monday.

The team’s historic WBC run has taken place in the shadow of ongoing political turmoil back home. Multiple members of the Venezuelan squad have sidestepped any questions related to the United States’ operation to remove president Nicholas Maduro in the early morning hours of Jan. 3. Still, it’s a narrative likely to grow in volume before the two countries square off on Tuesday. U.S. president Donald Trump posted about the upcoming matchup immediately after Monday’s game, hinting callously that Venezuela might one day become the 51st state. 

Acuña, for his part, wanted to keep the focus on the field.

“We're here to speak about baseball,” he replied when asked about the political situation after his team’s semifinal win. “Our country deserves the game tomorrow. As my brother said, we are going to go out with the same energy and excitement. The country deserves that.”

Following the final out, Venezuelan fans streamed down the loanDepot Park stairwells, their chants echoing and rattling off the stadium walls. “Ayyyy ... Venezuela! Woo!” They sang it together, over and over and over again.

The noise carried down the halls, out onto the street, across the city, across the ocean, all the way to La Sabana, where a similar celebratory symphony was surely in full swing.

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