The Long Leap from Cricket to Hardball

Major League Baseball has tried to hard to expand its world market into countries that have not been exposed to baseball. One such country is India, which prefers viewing NBA basketball and Formula One racing to our pastime. But a sports marketing and management firm is trying to change all that.

7 Figures Management recently held a contest to find the hardest throwing arms in India. Managing Director Jeff Bernstein said the idea came from watching games of cricket, the country's national pastime.

"Yao Ming has been a huge success in linking China and the USA in basketball and has created over 350 million new fans of the game in China over the past seven years he has played in the U.S," Jeff Bernstein, managing director of 7 Figures Management, a sports marketing and management firm, told Reuters.

"Our hope is that our contestants can duplicate that success in baseball, creating fans in India over time through following these Indian nationals in their baseball career in the USA," he said in an e-mail response to questions.

8,000 participated in the contest, whose winners will train in Los Angeles for a year in an attempt to gain a career at baseball. 18-yr old Rinku Singh and 17-yr old Dinesh Patel were the top winners of the "Million-Dollar arm" contest. A third teenager will get a month's training for finishing third.

Singh won first prize after hitting 87-mph on the radar gun and being tops in accuracy. Patel threw the hardest at 89-mph.

"The training has started and it feels very good," Singh told Reuters by telephone. "We've just got back after watching a match, we had no clue about the game."

Read the whole story here.

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