|
|
|
|
In 2002, during a trip to his native Manipur after
an absence of 15 years, L. Somi Roy, a New York based media
curator was astonished to discover baseball being played in
this tiny Eastern Himalayan foothill state of India. He promptly
contacted his long time friend Muriel (Mike) Peters, a film
and television producer, and a die-hard Mets fan who had also
lived and worked in India.
|
 |
 |
Mike had many
questions: How did baseball get there? How did it survive
in a poor isolated state of India on the Burmese border?
What equipment do the players have? Did they have proper
coaching? How about a film about baseball in the Eastern
Himalaya? |
|
Funded by the Asian Cultural Council, Mike and Somi made a
field trip to Manipur in November 2004 in search of some answers.
Mike went laden with baseballs, coaching DVDs, Field of Dreams
starring Kevin Costner, a complete set of Ken Burns' Baseball
and 2 rulebooks to replace the players' Xeroxed copies. What
she saw charmed and moved her: athletic young players in flea-market
uniforms, passionately playing our national game in a most
unlikely corner of India.
|
 |
|
They returned
to New York and formed First Pitch in January 2005.
Doctors, lawyers, artists, sports marketers and writers
- all baseball fans - came together, drawn by the remarkable
news of a distant Asian culture where baseball survived
by sheer grit and where players played simply for the
love of the game.
First Pitch set out to support Manipuri baseball
players by building a bridge based on the shared strengths
and passions of the two cultures.
|
|
| |
| They approached
Spalding Baseball, Major League Baseball international
(MLBI), and their friends, to start working on a novel
approach to promote baseball in India: building a baseball
center in sports-crazy Manipur as a model to be replicated
in the rest of India. |
 |
From
top left, Mike Peters meets a woman catcher at a temple
in 2004. Players lineup at the 2004 exhibition game.
Richard Brockman and Mike and Somi Roy at First Pitch's
launch in June 2005.
|
|
| |
| |
|
