In search of baseball players for Olympics & Asiad, SAI may look at cricket
TURNING ‘RAW’ Indian cricketers into baseball players was a project that once inspired a Hollywood film. Seventeen years after the story of two aspiring fast bowlers from Uttar Pradesh airlifted to the US by Major League Baseball talent scouts was made into a sports movie, Million Dollar Arm, the idea is back —this time, with a push from the government.To address the drought in the player pool in two events that are going unrepresented in the Asian Games and the Olympics, the Sports Authority of India (SAI) is exploring the possibility of a talent transfer from cricket to baseball — a men’s-only sport at the multi-discipline events — and its women’s variant, softball.
Still at an ideation stage, the proposal was discussed during the meeting of the high-powered Mission Olympic Cell (MOC), w...
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