After success of their baseball's Million Dollar Arm, sports agents are set to launch Million Dollar Bat in USA to select players for cash-rich Indian league
'Sometimes to win, you have to change the game', reads the poster of Million Dollar Arm, the Hollywood film that released in May this year.
The movie was based on a true story, one that followed the tagline for real. In 2008, two American sports agents — JB Bernstein and Ash Vasudevan — came up with a never-done-before idea in the sporting world. They decided to launch a televised sports talent hunt called Million Dollar Arm, and flew to India looking for two unknown faces who could become professional pitchers in baseball leagues in the US.
The two were Rinku Singh and Dinesh Kumar Patel, two javelin throwers who became the first Indians to sign a professional sports contract in America. They were picked up by the Pittsburgh Pirates, a Major League Baseball club.
Six years on, Bernstein and Vasudevan have decided to turn the tables. After the success of their maiden venture, the team has now set out to look for cricket talent in America. And the reward is massive. The chosen ones will get a chance to be a part of the cash-rich Indian Premier League, and will train with an IPL franchise from November 2015. No prizes for guessing, they've named it the Million Dollar Bat.
The talent hunt will begin from June 2015, but the idea was thought upon barely two years into the inception of the Million Dollar Arm.
"We came here looking for cricketers (in 2008) and ended up finding javelin throwers," Vasudevan, who is in India currently, told dna on Friday.
"That was the fun part. Our objective was to find cricketers who could turn into professional baseball players, particularly pitchers, but we ended up finding javelin throwers. But we always thought baseball hitters could compete and excel at the highest levels in cricket."
The response to their latest venture has been positive, with cricket enthusiasts in India and IPL chief operating officer Sundar Raman backing the idea. However, six years ago, no one believed in Bernstein and Vasudevan's vision.
"I wish they did," Vasudevan said with a chuckle. "Ninety-nine per cent people thought we were utterly insane in trying out what we were. When I spoke to my friends in India, they told me nobody knew about baseball in India, and if we wanted to create something, we should do for cricket. But I often wondered what are the odds that a Sachin Tendulkar-like talent will slip through the cracks. And that's why I came to India," he recalled.
It is with this same belief that the duo will scout for cricket talent in the US. The San Francisco-based Vasudevan said apart from the sub-continental population, even the locals there are slowly getting hooked on to cricket, and the IPL is only adding to the attraction.
"If you leave aside Indians living in America, I think IPL as a sport and format is slowly getting a lot of attention there. The US sports market is the biggest and the richest. So you have football, baseball, basketball, hockey... a lot of sports competing for eyeballs.
"But I have met many baseball players and they have talked about watching an IPL game, and having enjoyed it. So the awareness is spreading, and if we find someone from America playing cricket at the highest level, the popularity will definitely increase," he added.
So are they looking at only professional baseball players for the Million Dollar Bat?
"We will be naive in not looking at anyone else. If anything, we learnt from our first experience that you have to have an open mind, because if we had stuck to only looking at cricketers, we wouldn't have discovered Singh and Patel. It's going to be called Million Dollar Bat, but pretty much anyone can try. Even pitchers are welcome (as bowlers)," Vasudevan said.
And are they confident of replicating the success of Million Dollar Arm and finding another winner who, as they say, has changed his game?
"Without any doubt," Vasudevan shot back. "We found during Million Dollar Arm that you have the numbers, which was close to a 100 million kids. We just have to go and find them. And I have no doubt that we'll find the stars in America."
Who knows, the IPL might soon have two Americans slogging it out of the Wankhede.
What was the Million Dollar Arm?
In 2008, two American sports agents — JB Bernstein and Ash Vasudevan — launched a televised sports talent hunt aimed at finding contestants with the strongest throwing arm in India. The show offered $1 million to anyone who could throw three consecutive balls at more than 90mph. It was called Million Dollar Arm. Rinku Singh, 19, won the competition, while the runner-up was Dinesh Patel, also 19. Both were javelin throwers from rural Uttar Pradesh. The two became the first Indians to sign a professional sports contract in America, and were picked up by the Pittsburgh Pirates, a Major League Baseball club. In May 2014, a Hollywood movie by the same name was released, based on the lives of Singh and Patel.
What are the two doing now?
Singh is still with the Pittsburgh Pirates, but has struggled with injuries over the last couple of years. Patel, however, struggled in the second year itself and came back to India.
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