Since that year, baseball has transformed into the nation's most popular sport, a status it enjoys till today.
The award is given annually to honor the Venezuelan player who recorded the best individual performance in Major League Baseball, as voted on by sports journalists in Venezuela.
Possible reasons for the decline include strained relations between the U.S. and Venezuela and the increasingly ubiquitous presence of MLB teams in the country creating more competition for talent there.
[3][4] In November 2011 Washington Nationals catcher Wilson Ramos was kidnapped while home to play for his Venezuelan winter league team, Tigres de Aragua.
Money-hungry agents prey on naive and underprivileged latino baseball players in attempts to pocket as much of their signing bonuses as possible.
These academies are often very low quality, with their main purpose being to hide players that are too young to officially sign from other teams that are scouting talent in the same area.