MIAMI — Ronald Acuña Jr. scored easily from third base for Venezuela at the World Baseball Classic, and about a half-dozen of his teammates hopped over the dugout railing to start a celebration.
It was a 1-0 game. In the first inning. Didn’t matter.
“For our people, baseball is joy,” Jessalyn Suarez, an office manager from Miami, said as she walked into LoanDepot Park about an hour earlier. “Today is joy. Today is not about anything else.”
She was like many other Venezuelan fans Friday: wearing her team’s jersey, her country’s flag knotted loosely around her neck, the country’s yellow-blue-red color scheme painted on her face and the faces of some of her friends.
Unusual political times didn’t seem to matter.