{"id":177923,"date":"2026-02-14T12:48:13","date_gmt":"2026-02-14T12:48:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/177923\/"},"modified":"2026-02-14T12:48:13","modified_gmt":"2026-02-14T12:48:13","slug":"mlb-agents-scramble-to-help-venezuelan-players-before-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/177923\/","title":{"rendered":"MLB, agents scramble to help Venezuelan players before season"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.yardbarker.com\/mlb\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Major League Baseball<\/a>\u00a0will play spring training games soon (Feb. 20), and players will start playing games to prepare for the World Baseball Classic, which begins March 17.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Despite this, Major League Baseball faces the challenge of ensuring that players from Venezuela return to the United States safely and legally so they can begin their seasons. According to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.espn.com\/mlb\/story\/_\/id\/47916493\/mlb-teams-proactive-rushing-venezuelan-players-back-us\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">ESPN\u2019s Alden Gonzalez<\/a>, once the United States and the Trump Administration arrested the President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, multiple agents who represented Venezuelan players scrambled to secure them visas.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve never dealt with a team in December trying to process visas, especially for a guy who&#8217;s never been in trouble,&#8221; one agent told Gonzalez. &#8220;Just based on that, things are different.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Los Angeles Angels general manager Perry Minasian said of the situation,\u00a0&#8220;We were proactive in having our [Venezuelan] players come out early.&#8221; \u00a0Players from the Dominican Republic and Venezuela <a href=\"https:\/\/www.espn.com\/mlb\/story\/_\/id\/47916493\/mlb-teams-proactive-rushing-venezuelan-players-back-us\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">made up 25%<\/a> of major league rosters last season, which presents a major problem for Major League Baseball.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Major League Baseball\u00a0will play spring training games soon (Feb. 20), and players will start playing games to prepare&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":177924,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164],"class_list":["post-177923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177923\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}