Remember Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel, the Indian teenagers who had a tryout for Major Leage Baseball scouts a few weeks back? The pitchers flew to California to work out in San Francisco and then show their stuff at USC, with the hopes of landing a major league contract. Crazy, right? Neither had even played baseball before last year. Well, one team bit. The MLB team to sign BOTH players to minor league contracts is ... Your Pittsburgh Pirates. Walkoff Walk has been following this story from the beginning, and heralds the glorious news, which Yahoo Japan was the first to report. Surprsingly there is nothing about it on Rinku and Dineh's blog, Our Baseball Yatra. There is, however, this entry from Rinku:
JB sir explained to us today about the mind tricking us. He say that brain trick body to do bad sometimes. What we have to do is learn to say no to our brains and tell our arms to just throw. We need no excuses in our mind. Just do our best and rewards will come. He ask us what we would do if we were throwing Javelin against man who throw farther than our best throw… We then realize that we trick our body to think we can do better than our best to beat other man. That was good way to show us and we understand much better now. We want to pitch very good. We are working so hard and we are told that we may sign contract next week. When that is true it will be the best day of our lives!
Congratulations guys, and welcome to the most successful franchise in all of American baseball! UPDATE: From Dinesh's blog:
We then went to a movie that was very bad called Rock and Rolla. it was supposed to be big action, but it was no action at all. At least the seats were very comfortable and the theater was very clean.
Non-NPB News: Pittsburgh Sign Indian Pitchers [NPB Tracker] Baseball Yatra Is Great Success: Pirates Sign Rinku And Dinesh [Walkoff Walk]