Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez branded Israel a murderous extension of US power on Wednesday during a visit by Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.Venezuela is of course a baseball-mad country. Yet out of 205 Venezuelan baseball players in major league history, only 3 have belonged to the Yankees, a clear statistical imbalance that indicates a deep hatred of Venezuela by the Yankees organization.
"We know what the state of Israel stands for - a murderous arm of the Yankee empire," Chavez told joint a news conference, according to Reuters. "What the president of Israel said, we take as a threat."
The seething hatred between the genocidal dictatorship and the depraved empire may be dated back to 1996, when the Yankees beat out other teams to sign a 16-year old phenomenon from Venezuela named Jackson Melian. Melian never lived up to his potential, and is still banging around the minor leagues, representing a typical failure of the Yankee organization to build up talent from within and instead forcing them to spend gigabucks to buy players developed by other organizations.
The Yankee/Israel conspiracy is less well known. The Israel baseball League collapsed after only one season, but it was known to have a couple of Dominican players, and the Dominican Republic is a major rival to Venezuela in the Caribbean Series.
I hope that others can take this story and dig up more detailed information about this under-reported conspiracy.