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Nationals Catcher Wilson Ramos Kidnapped | News

By on November 10, 2011
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Wilson Ramos, one of the Washington Nationals’ most promising young baseball players, was kidnapped at gunpoint Wednesday night from his family’s home in Venezuela.  The 24-year-old Ramos, the starting catcher for the Nationals, had returned to his native country for the winter and planned to participate in roughly 10 games for his Venezuelan winter league team, the Aragua Tigers, starting Thursday.

Wednesday evening, four armed men arrived at Ramos’s mother’s house in the Santa Ines sector of the central city of Valencia, and took Ramos away, according to multiple news reports out of Venezuela.

“It’s true, Wilson Ramos was kidnapped 40 minutes ago,” Katherine Vilera, spokeswoman for the Tigers, said in a statement Wednesday evening. She said that Venezuela’s judicial police, the CICPC, were investigating.

“The CICPC are up on this and were going to his house in Santa Ines,” she said. “They took him from his house.”

She added that the only details the Tigers knew were that the four men sped off with Ramos in a four-by-four vehicle.

The Nationals acquired Ramos midway through the 2010 season when they traded closer Matt Capps to the Minnesota Twins. Ramos has since emerged as part of the Nationals’ bedrock, a dazzling defensive catcher with a powerful bat. This year, his first full season, Ramos batted .267 with a .779 on-base plus slugging percentage and 15 home runs.