For decades, Major League Baseball (MLB) has recruited international players from countries such as the Dominican Republic, Japan, Venezuela and Cuba.
Now, it has set its sights on India as its next hotspot for baseball recruitment.
MLB’s Toronto Blue Jays number one prospect is Arjun Nimmala, 19, of Florida, who is a shortstop for the team’s Vancouver Canadians minor league, MLB.com reported.
Nimmala was the 20th overall pick in the league’s 2023 draft, making him the first-generation Indian American selected in the first round. He was only 17, according to NBC News.
He has since risen to number 46 in MLB’s rankings of its top 900 prospects.
Nimmala told NBC News that his main goal is to make it to the major leagues, but it may take several years due to his age and experience.
Cricket is one of India’s favorite sports, but the MLB is organizing tournaments for children and introducing baseball programs at schools to broaden its outreach in India, NBC News reported.
“We want to try to introduce the sport to as many kids as possible,” Chris Marinak, MLB’s chief operations and strategy officer, told NBC News. “That’s the foot in the door. That’s the way that you educate kids on the game. You get kids to fall in love with it, and they become fans for the rest of their lives.”
Marinak told NBC News that the goal is to bring baseball to India both inside homes and on the field.
“We’re focusing on getting our MLB games on broadcast and streaming,” Marinak told NBC News. “We have two partners in India right now that are putting games live for the postseason and the regular season, and we’re seeing great interest from fans around consumption.”
For its 2025 season, the MLB has 265 international players from 18 countries and territories, representing about 27% of the players who are foreign-born, according to the MLB.
In 2019, MLB opened its first office in India and launched its First Pitch grassroots program, which gives primary school children across New Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai the opportunity to learn about baseball through workshops led by MLB international coaches, Reuters reported.
The league has also hosted the MLB Cup, a tournament for amateur youth teams across India since 2021, according to NBC News.
Marinak said the league has high ambitions, given that India is the world’s most populous country with 1.4 billion people.
“When you have a billion fans that are watching cricket, it creates a real opportunity to grow the sport,” Marinak told NBC News. “If we can get baseball to the scale of cricket, it would be a huge penetration into that market. It would look a lot like what you see in Japan (and the) United States. It can be done.”
In 2023, Nimmala traveled to India, where many members of his family still live, to see MLB’s initiatives and help grow the game in the country, NBC News reported.
“To be able to go there and not only see that baseball is a part of India, as well, but just also trying to make it bigger, I think that makes me super proud,” Nimmala told NBC News. “Knowing that I have a possibility of doing that and just seeing how much baseball is played in India already, I thought was very cool.”
While the MLB has never had an India-born player compete at the major league level, Kumar Rocker made history by becoming the first player of Indian descent to play in the league September 2024, MLB.com reported.
Rocker, 25, the son of an Indian mother and Black father, is a pitcher for the Texas Rangers.
“It definitely means a lot to me,” Rocker told MLB.com last year. “I think it means more to my mom. She always let me know that I was Indian growing up, being half and half. And I think she’s going to be really happy about it.”
Stories by Vashti Harris
Mosaic staff writer Vashti Harris can be reached at vharris@njadvancemedia.com.
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