The 'crazy hour' dance that has carried Venezuela through the Classic

Before each game in the World Baseball Classic, Team Venezuela gathers in a circle in its dugout. As pitcher Eduard Bazardo pounds upon a special drum – known as el tambor – the players take turns jumping into and out of the circle to show off their moves.

This isn’t just any dance circle, though. This is tambores, a traditional Afro-Venezuelan style of music and dance the baseball team has rallied around. The drum is the backbeat, and the dance can begin with just one drum, like in the Venezuelan dugout, or it can be a party with an entire band of drummers.

“I would say it's very Caribbean, because you can also see some tambores dances in Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic. I think there might be some tweaks in every nation, but it's very traditional in Venezuela,” said Daniel Alvarez, the co-founder and director of El Extrabase, and a writer who covers the Marlins and Latin and Venezuelan baseball. He also has a special connection to the music: He hired a tambores band for his wedding.

“What you see right there, that's us,” Venezuela manager Omar López said. “That's our country. That's us. That's winter ball. That's how we enjoy our baseball. We understand everybody has a different culture. You go to Puerto Rico, they have a different way. La Plena in Puerto Rico, that's amazing. It's kind of the same, but it’s a different type of music. In the Dominican, it's Merengue, Ripiao, it's Bachata, Dembow. There's a lot of ways prior to the game they get loose and identify who they are and who we are.”

(Don’t expect to see López jumping in with the players anytime soon, though: “I will not step in because I don't know how to dance tambor,” López joked. “I know a little bit, but I don't know if I'm going to step up one of those days.”)

Spend enough time in Venezuela and you’ll surely hear the music.

“You can go to the beach, for example. Let's say you go to Ocumare de la Cosa, which is where Eduard [Bazardo] basically grew up. It's a beach near Maracay. If you go there, they're gonna be dancing tambores all the time,” Alvarez said. “If you go to Gran Sabana or La Guaira, which is where Ronald [Acuña Jr.] and Maikel [Garcia] are from, you're gonna have tambores. At any Venezuelan party, you can have salsa, you can have merengue, you can have reggaeton, but at some point in the night you're going to have tambores.”

Tambores can go on for five minutes or it can go on for hours. It often comes out at parties around midnight, and the time is known as “hora loca,” or “crazy hour.”

“Hora loca is the part of the wedding where they stop playing the dance music, like merengue, salsa and all that stuff,” Allan Hrastoviak Arbelaez, the social media coordinator for the World Baseball Softball Confederation, said. “That’s when they put music on that everybody can sing and dance to and part of that is tambores.”

For fans and players from Venezuela, it means a lot to see the dance make it to a global stage at the Classic.

“It’s something pretty cool to show about our culture,” Alvarez said. “Obviously, we are [here for] baseball and we have a pretty good baseball team, but to also show that side, it's pretty cool. We have a lot to offer with our food, with our music, with our dances, and the folklore and everything that we have, as well.”

Every step of the way through this tournament, a popular Venezuelan tambor band, Tambor Urbano, has been blasting from the speakers.

“We love it. I think we did it in the last WBC as well,” pitcher and breakout star Enmanuel De Jesus said. “We enjoy it when we hear that music. That's something that pumps us up and gets us ready for the game.”