“The next time they make a ranking of the World Baseball Classic, Venezuela is number one. The rest can sort themselves out,” Maikel García said proudly after being named the tournament’s MVP. The 26-year-old third baseman became one of the main faces of Venezuela’s title run after a 3-2 win over the United States in Tuesday night’s final, capping a tournament in which he hit .385, homered, drove in seven runs and kept showing up in the biggest moments for a team that knocked out Japan, Italy and the American side on the way to winning the World Baseball Classic.

The award also sealed a sudden change in stature that he himself has described without much embellishment. “I always tell my brothers that are in Venezuela that everything can change in one year,” he said while looking back on what he had gone through not long before. In 2024, he felt stuck for months, with a very poor offensive season and the sense that he could not quite find himself, but 2025 changed both his place in the game and the way he saw himself. “I didn’t believe in my talent until 2025,” he admitted. “I knew that I could give more, and that’s why I’m here in the World Baseball Classic.” That shift, more mental than statistical, explains a large part of his story.

From doubt to the biggest stage in the World Baseball Classic

That progression cannot be understood through numbers alone, even if the numbers support it. After a very difficult 2024 season, Maikel García found in 2025 the push he had been missing: his offensive production rose, he won a Gold Glove, and for the first time he started to feel like a player capable of holding his own among the best. “I never imagined being the MVP of a World Baseball Classic, but God’s plan is perfect. It’s my turn today,” he said with the trophy already in his hands. He also left another line that helps explain what that recognition meant to him: “That was huge, and it motivated me to work harder.”

There is also a very specific ambition inside that growth: making a name for himself within a family full of well-known surnames. He is a cousin of Ronald Acuña Jr., has close ties to Alcides Escobar and Kelvim Escobar, and belongs to a line of baseball players that has turned La Sabana into an almost mythical place on the map of Venezuelan baseball. But he has been insisting on another idea for some time now. “I’m Maikel García,” he said during a Spring Training interview. “I want people to know who Maikel García is.” He trains in the offseason with Acuña Jr., watches him and asks questions, even if he jokes that his cousin offers him only the simplest hitting advice possible: “See the ball and hit it.”

La Sabana, the village that keeps producing MLB players

A large part of that story begins in La Sabana, a small fishing village on the north-central coast of Venezuela, isolated between mountains and sea, with only a handful of streets and an almost obsessive relationship with baseball. Children grow up there between the beach, the river, schoolyards and improvised games of pelotica de goma, in a scene that different members of the family describe less as a hobby than as a way of life. “As long as I can remember, all we did was play baseball,” Kelvim Escobar said when speaking about a place that has produced dozens of professional players and at least eight major leaguers within the same extended family network.

The place even has its own baseball geography. Estadio Óscar Santiago Escobar, built next to the school and with a V-shaped centre field because the cemetery sits behind it, says quite a lot about the singularity of La Sabana. The village’s professional players have helped fund its renovations and return every year to keep their connection with the community alive. Tournaments, parties and family gatherings are held there, with baseball still at the centre of everything. “Kids play ball anywhere in the village… in the street, on the beach, at school,” Ronald Acuña Jr. said while describing a routine that helps explain why so many players keep coming out of such a small place.

The skinny kid almost nobody saw coming

Out of that environment came a teenager who was not easy to picture in the elite game. When the Kansas City Royals invited him to a tryout at the organisation’s academy in the Dominican Republic, Maikel García stood close to 5-foot-11 but weighed only around 57 or 58 kilos. He was so thin that, as he later recalled, he took part in part of that tryout wearing a regular T-shirt because he kept getting tangled up in the actual uniform top when he moved. He lacked strength, he was not a good runner, and during his first years in the club’s system he was even managed carefully so he could physically get through the season. “I was mad about that,” he recalled when speaking about those days, when he was even taken out early in a season because of his apparent fragility.

Even so, the Royals saw something others did not. Alcides Escobar, who already knew the organisation well, was the one who alerted club officials that there was a cousin in La Sabana worth looking at. Behind that fragile frame were quick feet for the game, instincts, feel for the bat, command of the strike zone and a very natural way of positioning himself, throwing and understanding baseball. “He was a baseball player. You just had to wait for the body to grow,” said Rene Francisco, one of the club figures who believed most strongly in him when he still lacked strength and physical presence.

A title for his country and a name of his own in baseball

That journey helps explain why the final out of the World Baseball Classic left him standing still for a few seconds. When he was asked who he was thinking about in that moment, he did not first mention himself, his family or his MLB career. “I was thinking about the people in Venezuela,” he replied. “It’s a hard process for the people in Venezuela and we play every night for them.” In another interview, he returned to the same point with an even more direct line: “Our country needed this, and we needed it too.”

His tournament was also shaped by that mix of pride and vindication. “People didn’t believe in us, but we believed in each other and we did it,” he said after the final. Then he added another line that fits both his own moment and that of his national team: “They underestimated Venezuela because we had never won anything, but we are powerful.” The tournament MVP, the Kansas City Royals third baseman and the young man who spent years trying to make his way among so many illustrious surnames ended the biggest night of his career looking back towards the same place he came from.