MUMBAI: Eleven years after Major League Baseball first opened an office in Beijing, laying the ground for its strategy to grow the game in the Middle Kingdom, MLB is ready to try and make its mark in India.
Jim Small, MLB’s senior vice president of international business, who until his recent promotion had been based in Tokyo as vice president of Asia-Pacific, tells Baseball America that MLB is now eying a similar strategy in India.
He should know. For 16 years, he has helped spearhead MLB’s effort to grow the game in countries with less of a baseball tradition, such as China. MLB spent five years researching the market there, then decided to officially set up shop in Beijing in 2008.
As Small told the website, the China strategy has centered around getting major league programming on TV, products into stores and school kids interested in the game. MLB has built three baseball academies around China and recently joined forces with a Chinese company to build nearly two dozen more.
The goal, as Small explained to Baseball America, was to develop both players and interest in the game. The thinking went that if a player made it to the major leagues, viewers from his home country will want to watch major league games on TV and buy MLB products. Small said there are already seven minor league players in the US who graduated from their baseball academies in China.
About India, Small said: “We can spend three or four years and learn the market, and at the end of that period decide if we think we can go with a more aggressive strategy to grow our business there.”
He pointed out two intriguing factors for India: the popularity of cricket and the market potential of a population of more than 1 billion people.
“There are very few sports played above the waist,” Small said. “And when we go and see the people that we’re supporting in baseball there, we see tremendous athletes who can throw and catch and hit. They may not have played a lot of baseball. They may have used the wrong foot to touch the base when they turn a double play, but they have the ability to throw a laser beam to first base. And that’s a really attractive thing.”
The market opportunity in the second most populous country in the world is undeniable too.
“In a country of 1.1 billion people, 90% have a connected device in their hands, either a smart phone or Internet-connected cell phone,” Small said. “And 89% of those people have been on social media in the last three days. When you talk about the ability to communicate rapidly with a lot of people, we think there’s a huge opportunity there.”
For now, MLB’s international strategy, Small said, is two-fold. First, grow the game by attracting the best players to the major leagues from around the world. Then grow the business by televising games and selling their products around the world.
Working within that framework means MLB will hold only the occasional games on foreign soil. But as is indicated by this season’s schedule – featuring the opener in Tokyo, two regular season series in Monterrey, Mexico, and the London series in June – it is a number that’s going to continuing to grow, Baseball America reports.
“What we feel is if we stick to our knitting and we focus on those short-term goals, the long-term goals will sort out themselves,” Small said. “. . . If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. We absolutely have a very clear road to follow.”
As far as a tangible MLB-India connect is concerned however, what comes to mind is Million Dollar Arm. It was in 2014 that Disney released the American biographical sports drama based on the true story of baseball pitchers Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel, who were discovered by sports agent JB Bernstein after winning a reality show competition in India.
