At India’s first MLB Cup in 2021 -- an under-11 competition -- only 12 teams took part. In a country obsessed with cricket and soccer, it was difficult to find the necessary coaches and ballplayers ready to come out and hit the field.
Just a few years later and the tournament has exploded. At last year’s MLB Cup, 150 teams took part with hopes for an additional 30-plus clubs to enter the competition this year. Not only that, the tourney has expanded to now include an under-13 age group, allowing those kids who played in the first tournaments a chance to continue playing baseball.
That grassroots growth and commitment to baseball across the country helped lead to Wednesday’s announcement that MLB has partnered with RISE Worldwide (Reliance Initiative for Sports and Entertainment) to deliver fan experiences, digital content, and a live event in Mumbai this October.
“This partnership is a key milestone in MLB’s international growth strategy,” said Noah Garden, Deputy Commissioner, Business & Media. “Working with RISE will allow us to introduce the excitement of baseball to even wider audiences while strengthening cultural connections through sport.”
“India is one of the most dynamic sports markets in the world, and baseball's global rise makes this a natural moment to bring the sport closer to Indian fans,” a spokesperson from RISE Worldwide said. “RISE Worldwide is happy to partner with MLB to create experiences, on the ground and beyond, that make baseball accessible and exciting for audiences across the country.”
As the World Baseball Classic has shown, baseball is fast becoming a truly global sport and India is one of the countries that could one day lead the way. Since MLB first opened an office in India in 2019, they’ve introduced the MLB Cup, brought MLB’s First Pitch program to schools in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru – the three biggest cities in India – and have helped produce a pair of documentaries: “Indian Baseball Dreams,” about Blue Jays prospect Arjun Nimmala’s Indian heritage and “Hot Shots,” which featured cricket icon Shikhar Dhawan and MLB All-Star Adam Jones in the search for the country’s best amateur cricket and baseball players. MLB postseason games have been broadcast on Indian channels -- and with Indian broadcasters.
“We've been spending the last five-and-a-half-years, boots on ground, testing and learning and building broadcast relationships, building our grassroots programming,” Ryo Takahashi, Director of International Business, said. “We've built a strong enough foundation that if we make some noise now, we have places to point people to. If people see this and they're like, ‘I want to go play baseball or watch baseball,’ now we can say, ‘You can watch baseball on Geostar,’ which is under the Reliance umbrella. You're a kid, then we're in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, where there's baseball programs, there's a youth tournament.”
The explosion in the MLB Cup is a great way to see just how baseball has begun spreading organically following the foundational work being done in schools around the country.
In the first year of the MLB Cup, “we literally begged 12 coaches, like, ‘Please, get 12 people on your team and just come play, like I don't care if you've never played, we'll give you gloves, everything, just come and play,’” Takahashi said. “And then the following year we went up to like 60 teams, with half the kids having never played. They showed up and they're like, ‘What's baseball?’ They'd hit the ball and they'd run towards the pitcher. That's where we started.”
Now, the number of participants has swelled from about 150 to closer to 2,000.
“The majority of these teams, they had played baseball somewhere,” Takahashi said. “These are kids that obviously once went through some training, which means our coaching network had expanded.”
Beyond simply the growth of the sport are the stories that Takahashi and David Palese, manager of baseball development, have seen at these tournaments and programs.
“With the MLB Cup, we've gone to regions like Nizamabad, which is a small city in Telangana. There’s a huge western region in Maharashtra, which is the state where Mumbai is, but it’s so far in the outskirts, it’s like an eight-hour drive from Mumbai,” Takahashi said. “For them to leave their village and come to the Mumbai Regional is a huge, huge deal. Some of these kids play in flip flops and then they get shoes, they get socks, they get matching hats and shirts. We’ve had so many parents come and thank us. We’re like, ‘You’re not crying, we’re crying.’”
That focus on grassroots growth and education is something RISE will be engaged in, too. They have the Reliance Youth Foundation, run by Nita Ambani, who has reached millions of Indian youth in her work in sports development.
“She is a very big advocate of education in sports, which completely aligns with everything that we do with our First Pitch, MLB Cup or grassroots programming,” Takahashi said. “It's education first, sports as a supplement, and they go hand in hand.”
While the hope will be that a player like Arjun Nimmala will reach the Major Leagues and help inspire a generation, or that a young player in the MLB Cup will find his way to a big league organization one day, the goal for now is simply to help spread the dream of baseball to a new fanbase.
“Our job in the Indian market is not to create the next Yao Ming, it's not to somehow get Arjun into the big leagues. That's going to happen organically, it's out of our hands,” Takahashi said. “But the foundation building and making sure that kids have something to fall back into once they see that dream, once they see that opportunity, is what we're going to continue to do.”