The Million Dollar Arm - The movie version of Patel's and Singh's journey stars Jon Hamm of Mad Men fame and opens this weekend. Patel pitched in just 15 games over two seasons, posting a 5.27 ERA before being released. Growing up outside Varanasi, India's oldest and holiest city, he could throw with more might than the other boys in his village, and at 15 years old he went off to a sports school, Lucknow Sports Hostel, to cultivate this natural gift. Within a few years, Patel hoped, he'd be launching javelins for India's Olympic team.
Now 25, Patel is still trying to make a future for himself in baseball. It's a rare ambition in a country obsessed with cricket, another bat-and-ball game that is baseball's distant cousin and is probably as popular in India as baseball, basketball and football are combined in the U.S. But since returning to his native country, baseball has remained close to his heart, and he is in a unique position to bridge the American game with the Indian people.
"There is only one person in India right now that has played professional baseball, and that is Dinesh," said Jim Small, the MLB Asia vice president and the man who will decide the future of the sport in India.
Baseball isn't a completely foreign concept to India. The game is played at more than 30 universities, and Little League has been in India since 2008, now boasting about 900 players on 63 teams for ages 11-18.
Along the way he learned about baseball, and soon decided it needed to be played formally in India.
The federation now has teams in 27 cities around India. The teams, which are semi-professional, play for a national championship, and a national team competes in the West Asian Baseball Cup, which is a preliminary tournament for the Olympic-qualifying Asian Baseball Championship. International success, however, has been hard to come by for India's teams. There are other, more tangible impediments that must be overcome before baseball can become a viable sport on the subcontinent. Supplanting cricket as India's pastime is out of the question, at least any time in the foreseeable future. But baseball doesn't have to win over the entire country. "It's a big pie," Small said. "If you get a small slice of a big pie, it's still a pretty big slice."
In 2012, J.B. Bernstein, the agent who discovered Singh and Patel and on whom Hamm's character in the movie is based, said that a decade ago, "baseball wouldn't have worked in India. "There are a billion people that play a bat-and-ball sport, that are used to throwing and catching and swinging a bat," Small said in 2012. Through satellite television, games are broadcast to India on ESPN and other sports networks (according to the Times of India newspaper, 26 million Indians watched some American baseball on television in 2009). American military men introduced baseball to Japan following World War II and South Korea after the Korean War, in both cases during reconstruction efforts.
Baseball hopes to open a similar academy in New Delhi one day. "We're looking at the market, trying to learn it before Major League Baseball is going to go in and make India a baseball-playing nation."
The most important boost, though, would come if an India-born player were to reach the major leagues.
"Whether that turns India into a baseball-playing nation overnight, I'm not sure," Small said.
Five years after his arrival in America, Singh, who won the inaugural
Million Dollar Arm contest, remains the only India-born player in organized baseball in the U.S. If Patel serves to be baseball's leading ambassador in India, then Singh stands to be his homeland's baseball hero in America.
Despite discovering the game at an age that most baseball players are either getting drafted or joining the college ranks, the 25-year-old Singh said playing baseball has "become my dream."
Even though Patel didn't make it to the majors, the most telling sign that baseball and India could have a bright future together is the impression the sport has made on the country's only former professional player.
"I still love baseball," he said. Rinku Singh has an All-American Dream: to play in the major leagues one day for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
In 2008, he created a reality show about baseball called "Million Dollar Arm." "The goal was to find somebody with the raw talents to be able play to come back to the United States as the first Indian baseball player," Bernstein said.
That story inspired the new movie "Million Dollar Arm," featuring "Mad Men" star Jon Hamm as Bernstein. The show looked for contestants in India, which is home to 1.3 billion people.
Problem was few of them had heard of baseball.
Singh won the show and $100,000. "I had no clue, no clue," said Singh. What's a ball? Singh's story now has major league baseball actively scouting in India, and while he's still waiting for his chance in the big leagues, his story had already made it on the big screen.
