Pittsburgh Pirates snap up Indian spearchuckers

Times Online ^ | 26 Dec 2008 | Rhys Blakely

[BGHater]

The story reads like one of Bollywood’s less credible scripts: two struggling javelin throwers from impoverished Indian villages have been plucked from obscurity to become star pitchers for a Major League American baseball team.

Dinesh Patel, 19, a right-hander, and Rinku Singh, a 20-year-old lefty, may never have played a competitive baseball game in their lives, but on the strength of their performances on a reality TV competition they have been signed by the Pittsburgh Pirates, the five-time World Series Champions. In the process they are thought to have become the first Indian citizens to sign a contract with a major US team in any sport.

Mr Singh, the son of a truck driver and the youngest of nine chilren, won the “Million Dollar Arm” competition by throwing a baseball faster and more accurately than 30,000 other contestants from across the subcontinent. The feat earned him a USD100,000 cash prize, six months intensive coaching and the opportunity to try out for America’s leading baseball teams.

Mr Patel, who was brought up in a dusty village in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh by his uncle and grandmother after his parents found that they could not afford to raise him, fouled his competition throw.

However, his ability to hurl a baseball at more than 90 miles an hour -- having never been coached -- was sufficiently impressive for the competition’s backers to pay for his passage to the US, too.

The pair’s success has already sparked a small-scale frenzy for baseball in India, a land more usually associated with cricket.

Rinku Singh, 19, of India throws during a workout in Tempe, Arizona

[big'ol_freeper]

Guess they needed to get them under contract before the Yank-offs offered them seven year, $180 contracts.