Juan Gutiérrez can tell something is wrong with baseball in Venezuela every time his team, the Caracas Lions, takes the field.

The Lions have won the championship 20 times since the Venezuelan Professional Baseball League was founded in 1945. But in a city of 2 million, only a handful bother to attend Lions games.

“We used to have a lot of fans in the stadium,” said Gutiérrez, a relief pitcher, as he sat in the Lions dugout before a recent home game. “But because of the situation in Venezuela right now, not that many people can come. It’s really sad.”

Venezuela’s economic meltdown, which has produced shortages of food and medicine, near hyperinflation, and a rise in crime, is now squeezing the country’s national sport.

Rising ticket prices, falling incomes and the fear of getting mugged while leaving ballparks after dark have reduced attendance by about half for the Lions and the other seven teams in the league. Due to government exchange controls, baseball clubs are struggling to secure the US dollars to import bats and gloves and sign overseas talent. The collapse of the bolívar, the national currency, means that many Venezuelan players earn the equivalent of just $300 a month.

The situation is so dire that league officials considered cancelling the 2017-18 season which runs from October to January. It was only saved after the state-run oil company stepped in with a $10m lifeline.

“When we play and the games are broadcast on TV and radio that inspires kids to take up baseball. We create baseball fever. That’s the most important thing we do,” said Juan José Ávila, the league’s president.

Fans watch a Caracas Lions game. Attendance has dropped by about half as a result of rising ticket prices and falling incomes. Photograph: Ariana Cubillos/AP

The government bailout has prompted criticism that president Nicolás Maduro’s administration should direct such largesse to more pressing needs, like feeding the hungry. But Ávila and others argue that canceling the season would have thrown thousands of players, team officials, food vendors and stadium security guards out of work.

“It would have made no sense,” said Ignacio Serrano, a sports columnist for the Caracas newspaper El Nacional. “Baseball is a business that produces a lot of jobs.”

The sport was introduced here in the 1890s by Venezuelan students who picked up the game while attending US universities. Although Venezuela has never done much on the football pitch, the country is a baseball powerhouse. It has provided more foreign players to major league teams in the US than any other country except the Dominican Republic. They include José Altuve, the All-Star second baseman who led the Houston Astros to victory in this year’s World Series.

The sport even played a peripheral role in the country’s socialist revolution ushered in by the late Hugo Chávez. He claimed to have joined the Venezuelan army in order to escape poverty and pitch for the military’s baseball team. Chávez ended up leading a failed 1992 military coup and was elected president six years later.

In a 2009 television interview Chávez declared: “I am still the young baseball player who wanted to play at Yankee Stadium.”

Under Maduro, who became president when Chávez died of cancer in 2013, professional and amateur sports teams have found it hard secure food and equipment as well as airfares to get to games and overseas tournaments.

Young players in Caracas. The country has provided more foreign player to major league US teams than any except the Dominican Republic. Photograph: Robert Madden/National Geographic/Getty Images

They must also fend off criminals.

Last year, highway bandits stopped a bus carrying one of Venezuela’s football clubs and made off with cash, laptops, uniforms, cleats and balls. That prompted the baseball league to seek government help and team buses are now flanked by police escorts.

Some sports officials have thrown in the towel. Nearly two dozen baseball academies that had been set up in Venezuela in the 1990s and 2000s by US major league teams to nurture talent have closed down. Due to the strife, the 2018 Caribbean Series, Latin America’s biggest baseball tournament, has been moved from Venezuela to Mexico.

As for the fans, many say that buying baseball tickets, which cost less than a dollar, takes a back seat to larger concerns like securing milk and antibiotics.

It doesn’t help that the Lions’ home field, the creaking 65-year-old University Stadium near downtown Caracas, features broken toilets and often lacks running water. Last year a game was cancelled due to a blackout. The government is building a new ballpark in Caracas, called Hugo Chávez Stadium, but it’s unclear when it will be finished.

Venezuela’s late president Hugo Chávez runs during a friendly game in Caracas. Photograph: Jorge Silva/Reuters

The stadium “will be our gift to Venezuelan baseball”, Maduro declared in a speech in March. Yet numerous league officials claim, under their breaths, that the only thing that will save the sport is better economic stewardship by Maduro – or a new government.

For those who can afford it there is still much to love about Venezuelan baseball. The teams include a mix of up-and-coming Venezuelans, stars from around Latin America and – despite the political tensions between Washington and Caracas – numerous Americans.

“I know the situation here is very difficult,” said Mike Rojas, a Florida native who manages the Lions. “But now that the season has started, it will give the fans some relief and help them forget about everything that’s going on in the country.”

That seemed to be the case at a recent game between the Lions and the Sharks of the Caribbean port city of La Guaira. Despite a three-hour rain delay, some 5,000 diehard fans refused to leave. Once play began they chanted, drank beer, hurled abuse at opposing players and banged on bongo drums until well after midnight –when the Sharks finally won by a score of 6-2.