Baseball is booming in Colombia’s capital. But not because of Colombians.

Baseball is not popular in Colombia. Except on the Caribbean coast, football dominates. In Bogotá, the capital, many know very little about ‘béisbol’. And the city has only two public baseball fields.

But if you pass the Hermes Barros Cabas baseball stadium on a weekend, it doesn’t feel that way. On a recent Sunday, five groups of children dressed in their team uniforms filled every corner of the main field.

Coaches conducted batting practice while children held ground balls or pop flies. Parents shouted words of encouragement or instruction. The smell of coffee and fried snacks wafted behind the stands.

However, most of the people there were not Colombian.

The vast majority of the 500 players in Bogotá’s baseball league come from neighboring Venezuela, where baseball takes place is the most popular sport. As Venezuelans often say: it is in their blood.

“It doesn’t matter which country I went to, I would take my referee equipment with me,” said the league’s chief referee, Pastor Colmenares, 50. When he left Venezuela for Colombia in 2017 in search of better-paid work, the only Mr. Colmenares’ suitcase filled with his baseball equipment.

Venezuela’s economic collapse and political repression have led to the largest refugee crisis in the Western Hemisphere, and no country in Latin America has seen a greater influx of Venezuelan migrants than Colombia (a country in Latin America). estimated 2.9 million in a country of 52 million). And no Colombian city has been a more popular destination than Bogotá (a estimated 600,000 in a city of almost 8 million inhabitants).

For many Venezuelans, whose lives were turned upside down in their home country, they now face an uncertain future – and in some cases they have been met with hostility by Colombians. For them, the league offers a measure of refuge.

“For me it means hope,” said Félix Ortega, 51, a software consultant who moved to Colombia from Venezuela in 2018 and whose sons, Sebastián, 13, and Rodrigo, 8, play in the league.

“My children maintain that contact with our culture,” he continued. “But it is also a meeting place for all of us. It’s like having a piece of Venezuela here.”

The league, in various forms, has been around since 1945 and consisted mainly of Colombians. But that changed in recent years, as more Venezuelans arrived.

“We have opened the door for them,” said league president José Francisco Martínez Petro, a Colombian, adding that the newcomers bring established baseball knowledge and have raised the level of the league.

Of the nine clubs in the amateur competition, each fielding several teams from different age groups, starting from three years old, there is one that is clearly Venezuelan: the Leones. Unlike other teams named after Major League Baseball clubs in the United States, the Leones are a nod to the most successful Venezuelan professional team, which not every Venezuelan in Bogotá was a fan of back home.

“Once you get here, it doesn’t matter anymore,” said Gabriel Arcos, a systems engineer who grew up cheering for a Leones rival in Venezuela and moved to Bogotá in 2016. “Maybe you don’t like the Leones of Caracas, but as I always say: these are the Leones of Bogotá.”

Four years ago, when Iraida Acosta took over the Leones’ presidency, she said there were only six Venezuelan children. Now, she said, most of the 64 players are Venezuelan.

Ms. Acosta, 54, said she and her 9-year-old son left their Venezuelan hometown near the Caribbean coast in 2017 to visit her husband, who had come to Bogotá six months earlier to look for work. They ultimately stayed because the economic opportunities were better.

Still, it wasn’t easy.

“The culture, although brotherly, is completely different,” she said, later adding, “I cried a lot when I came here.”

When Ms. Acosta rode Bogotá’s public buses, she said she avoided talking so people wouldn’t hear her accent. She said people in Colombia would use a disrespectful term for Venezuelans and mutter, “Go back to your country.”

She discovered the baseball league on Facebook, signed her son up and started a community. She befriended the Colombians who ran the Leones club, and they turned the business over to her when family health complications arose.

Other Colombians Ms. Acosta met through baseball made her feel welcome. The sport, she said, has provided common ground.

“Without all the immigration – forced or desired or whatever – we wouldn’t have the quality of players and coaches here that we have now,” said Hernán Vasquez, 36, a Colombian who is an assistant Leones coach and whose seven years – old son plays in the league.

Mr Vasquez, who joked that he is now Venezuelan given the number of people he spends time with, is angry that many Colombians have singled out Venezuelans as the source of their country’s problems, such as rising crime rates.

“The majority – 99 percent of the Venezuelans I know – are professionals who came to work,” he said.

Mr. Colmenares left Barquisimeto, a city in northwestern Venezuela, six years ago because he said his three jobs — metalworker, referee and sometimes construction worker — still did not pay enough money to adequately feed his family. “When I arrived, my skin was practically attached to my bones,” he said.

At first, Mr. Colmenares said he struggled to find a job, going from company to company and offering anything. “A lot of us were looking for work,” he said. “You’d see a lot of, ‘Oh, you’re Venezuelan.’ No, no, no, we don’t want anything to do with the Venezuelans.’”

After finally finding work as a metalworker, Mr. Colmenares slowly built a life in Bogotá. His wife and daughter later joined him in Colombia, while another daughter and his son live in Chile. (He has not yet met his 6-year-old granddaughter, born in Chile.)

Mr. Colmenares also found his foundation in his true passion: being a referee. When he joined the league, he said only one other referee was Venezuelan. Today that is 11 out of 12.

“The competition represents everything to me,” he said through tears. “After my family it’s refereeing.”

Others have found a similar refuge. When Mr. Arcos left Caracas seven years ago due to declining opportunities, he arrived in Bogotá on his own. He went to work, found an apartment and three months later his wife and four-year-old son arrived.

They spent their first New Year’s Day alone in the city. For more than two years, they mostly stayed at home or explored Bogotá on their own.

But one day, on his way to play football with colleagues, Mr. Arcos came across the league’s baseball field and signed his son up the following week. His family soon started spending every weekend there. Guests for their children’s birthday parties all come from the league.

“It completely changed our lives,” said Mr. Arcos, 34.

Yet baseball is not quite the same as at home. Parents have complained that the competition for their children is not as good as in Venezuela. The league cannot always field a team for national tournaments, officials said, because Colombian Baseball Federation rules limit the number of foreign players to 20 percent of a roster.

And unlike in Venezuela, where there are baseball fields everywhere, the Bogotá league stadium is located in the center of the busy city, and it can take more than an hour to reach it.

When Suleibi Romero Gonzalez can’t let her son Darvish, 11, practice or play because she’s busy running her Venezuelan restaurant, she and another mother take turns taking their children to the field.

Ms. Romero, 37, a divorced mother of three, came to Bogotá alone in 2017 and then brought her family with her. She and her then-husband both loved baseball and wanted their oldest son to continue playing.

“It’s helpful because it’s the same group he’s been playing with since they were five years old,” she said.

Even as many Venezuelans leave Colombia for the United States, the baseball league remains a hub for the Venezuelan diaspora. Ms. Acosta said families who have not even left Venezuela are regularly reaching out through social media.

The messages, she said, usually say, “Hello, I need information. I’m coming to Colombia soon and I want my son to register to play there. ”