MLB postseason broadcasts in India helping spread the game

As the ball took off from Nick Castellanos’ bat during the top of the ninth inning of last year’s Braves-Phillies NLDS Game 2, arcing toward the warning track in right-center field, the crowd at Truist Park in Atlanta held its breath. A home run would put Philadelphia in the lead.

The fans in Atlanta weren’t the only ones stressed at the time, though. Manish Batavia, one of the India-based analysts along with Aayush Sharma for MLB’s postseason broadcasts on STAR India, was calling the game off a TV feed from Mumbai when he was suddenly thrust into the play-by-play role. His partner, Jacob Wilkins, calling his part from the MLB Network studios in Secaucus, N.J., had his wi-fi suddenly cut.

All of a sudden, with little time to react, Batavia stepped in as Michael Harris II made the catch and started the game-ending double play.

“If I’m going to war and I believe I need 100 arrows to win a war, I will go in with 200 arrows instead,” Batavia told MLB.com over Zoom following one of his broadcasts recently. “I believe in the philosophy of over-preparing and I’ve done that because I don’t want to sound clueless on air.”

Batavia admits that, like most people in India, he didn’t grow up on baseball. He had to learn the game, watching hours of footage and breaking down the clips as if he were a forensic analyst studying a crime scene, piecing together the rules, the statistical acronyms and their meaning.

“I’ll give you a very honest account of things. I don’t want to play to the gallery and say, ‘Oh, wow. We loved MLB as a child.’ That’s not the case in a sense. The bat vs. ball game has been a part of our system for years because of cricket, right? India is primarily a cricket-loving country, so yeah, we’ve enjoyed the bat versus ball contest, but baseball was hardly ever aired in India.”

Sharma, another sports broadcast veteran, is also relatively new to the game. He knows that he can prepare for the broadcasts as well as any other TV personality, but that the ingrained history with the game, the live-or-die tension that so many American fans feel in their bones is something that he’s still working on.

“What I have learned in four, five years of my professional career is that until and unless you have an emotional connection with the game, it is tough for you to call it,” Sharma said. “It’s not just like reading a book. You need to get yourself emotionally attached. Once you’re emotionally attached with the game, then you find yourself in a very comfortable position to call the games. I believe I’m not 100 percent there, but I’m trying my level best.”

The broadcasts are part of MLB’s hope of turning some of those bat-and-ball cricket fans into future baseball fans, players, perhaps even stars. MLB opened an office in the country in 2019 and has introduced First Pitch programs devoted to teaching the sport to children. They’ve hosted the MLB Cup for amateur youth teams to compete across the country, and have helped launch television programs like the documentary, “Indian Baseball Dreams” which followed Arjun Nimmala, an Indian-American and Blue Jays first-round Draft pick.

“If I think about what does it take for any foreign sport to take root over in a new international market, you need to have heroes that the fans can look up to,” said Raymond Liu, MLB’s vice president of international business. “Hopefully, some of these heroes look like them. I think that’s what we are seeing in Shohei [Ohtani’s] first World Series. Some of the ratings that you see in Japan, you see the effects of that.”

In addition to these broadcasts returning for the second straight season (MLB games have aired in the country for longer, but this is the second postseason featuring Batavia and Sharma), “HotShots,” a competition show hosted by former MLB star Adam Jones and cricket legend Shikhar Dhawan, is about to debut.

“You take the two most popular bat and ball sports in the world with a shared vocabulary,” Liu said. “Cricket’s the only other sport I am aware of that uses the word ‘innings’ and ‘runs.’ There’s got to be something there and it’s up to us to really bring those points of connection to the forefront for the fans there to want to cross over from cricket to baseball.”

That vocabulary is one of the things that Batavia and Sharma are hyper aware of when on the mic. Just as they first struggled to determine what acronyms like HR and OPS meant, they know many of their viewers are unsure of their importance as well.

“In my school days, I learned one thing: That your annual report card doesn’t reflect how intelligent you are,” Sharma noted. “If you are watching the scorecard of the game, you cannot make out how tough it is for the batter or the pitcher to perform there on the ground.”

They need to find ways to spell out things that an American viewer might take for granted — from noting how rare it is to hit multiple home runs in a game to the importance of a starter’s pitch count to even breaking down how to read the score bug on the screen, pointing out that the arrow’s direction refers to either the top or bottom-half of the inning.

“The viewer is not an idiot, but you need to handhold viewers and bring them in these days across the world,” Batavia said. “Because of the internet, because of our lives, we are on the phone every time we don’t have the patience for things that confuse us.”

MLB India has only been in the country for a few years, but the impact has already been felt by the country’s leading baseball fanatics.

Shamit Mali, who fell in love with the sport thanks to a cousin in the U.S., has umpired hundreds of youth games in the country — even hanging around the field when his work was done just because “this is such a beautiful sport.” The television broadcasts and spread of clips across social media and YouTube have brought the game directly to new fans.

“I remember when I first picked up a professional baseball in 2011, there was no great access to YouTube and the internet wasn’t that easily available,” Mali said. “We used to scour for videos on internet for drills. I’m a first baseman, so I used to search for first baseman drills, for hitting techniques and all that. But now, as everything is easily available, I have seen many coaches who have no connection to the game, learn from the content available on YouTube, and then successfully coach the kids and make a great team and even win tournaments.”

Players who first learned the game as young school children a few years ago have now become teenagers, their ascent on the field startling.

“I’m mesmerized to see a 14 year old kid with such skills,” Mali said. “I can’t even imagine having those skills when I was 14 years old. I just love watching them, the skills, the way they handle pressure, because that’s what sports teaches you. Sports teaches you life. That’s what I feel. It makes you ready for anything you face in life.”

Tejas Goradia, chief business officer of India On Track, a grassroots sports development company that has partnered with MLB, has seen this growth up close. It was his company that helped introduce the game to schools, helped connect these new players with the necessary equipment and instruction they needed. The availability of the sport on TV and across the internet is a boon for the game.

“When you’re a kid and you come back from school and your television is on, or whether your parents allowed you 15 minutes or 30 minutes to watch YouTube, when you going through the reels or you going through YouTube shorts, you cannot escape the Fernando Tatis bat flip, or certain similar exuberant players in Indian cricket. You like that flamboyance. Flamboyance attracts new fans. It may not go well with certain purists, but it attracts new fans.”

Their programs across Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore first started with just 15 teams. Now, there are 160 ballclubs with 4,000-5,000 kids under the age of 11 playing baseball. This is not just a job for Goradia, though. This experience has been life-changing for him.

“When you travel outside of the metro [areas], outside of the towns, life can get really, really tough for school children,” an emotional Goradia said. “We’ve had stories where kids — because of MLB Cup — this is the first time they got an opportunity to travel outside of their village, to come and play in a regional and come to Delhi or Mumbai. They are the first kid out of their own village to come to Delhi. In some cases, because we give them a flight ticket or a train ticket to come there, for them to sit in an airplane, that is a first in their life. That is a first in their families, that is a first in their village. So for them, the three letters ‘MLB’ is synonymous with how life can change.”

This is some of the magic that Batavia and Sharma are hoping to capture in their broadcasts. Not just the comebacks and walk-off wins, not just the big strikeouts and doubles to the gap, but the remarkable stories for the larger-than-life legends on the field.

“Because for us, every story is new. Every player has a new story. Every team is a new team. It’s a new subject,” Batavia noted. “We’re still scratching the surface and getting to understand the magic of this great game and this great league.”

Who knows, maybe this is the start of a great new baseballing nation, maybe this is where baseball in India can make its mark. Perhaps the young schoolchildren will soon be the first national team players fighting for a berth in the World Baseball Classic in future editions. With India in contention to host the 2036 Olympics, it would be a perfect time for all of these endeavors to tie together.

“If that were to happen,” Liu said thinking about the future, “it would be the perfect opportunity for a country of a billion cricket players — a bunch of big batsmen and fast bowlers — to apply their skill set to a sport that’s pretty adjacent, to see what they might be able to do in baseball on home soil in 2036.”