Pedro Ramirez and Daniel Palencia stepped onto the field Thursday night wearing caps with “VZ” on the side, a small but unmistakable gesture after earthquakes in Venezuela left Ramirez worried about his family and thinking about people far beyond his own home. The caps were meant to show that the Cubs players were with Venezuelans dealing with the wreckage.
Ramirez said the first quake on Wednesday was bad enough, then a second one made the situation worse. After the game, he texted his mother and did not hear back right away, and the silence hit hard because being far from home has never felt simple to him. He later reached her and learned his family was safe, but relief did not erase what he called deep sadness over the deaths, the children affected and the people left without homes.
The earthquakes claimed more than 150 lives and left many more people in Venezuela affected, which is why a cap mattered in a way a normal piece of gear never would. Ramirez said it was a way to show that he and Palencia were there with people in Venezuela and that Venezuelans outside the country were carrying the same pain. He added that all the Venezuelans around the club were sharing that burden together.
That burden also sits against the way Ramirez has lived his career. He said he left home at 12 years old to play baseball and learned to live far from family, but he also said that distance makes every unanswered text harder. The Cubs’ Venezuelan contingent also includes Moises Ballesteros, Jonathan Mota and Erick Castillo, and the team is still watching Ben Brown, who is dealing with a stress reaction in his neck similar to the injury that wiped out the second half of his 2024 season.
The next question is not whether Ramirez and Palencia cared; Thursday night made that plain. It is how quickly families and communities in Venezuela can recover after the quakes, and how many more players far from home will have to wait for a reply before they know the people they love are safe.
