The story reads like one of Bollywood’s less credible scripts: two struggling javelin throwers from impoverished Indian villages have been plucked from obscurity to become star pitchers for a Major League American baseball team.

Dinesh Patel, 19, a right-hander, and Rinku Singh, 20, a left-hander, may never have played a competitive baseball game in their lives, but on the strength of their performances on a reality TV competition they have been signed by the Pittsburgh Pirates, the five-time World Series Champions.

They are thought to be the first Indian citizens to sign a contract with a major US team in any sport.

Mr Singh, the son of a lorry driver and the youngest of nine children, won the “Million-Dollar Arm” competition by throwing a baseball faster and more accurately than 30,000 other contestants from across the sub-continent. The feat earned him a $100,000 (£68,000) cash prize, six months’ intensive coaching and the opportunity to try out for America’s leading baseball teams.

Mr Patel, who was brought up in a dusty village in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh by his uncle and grandmother after his parents found that they could not afford to raise him, fouled his competition throw.

However, his ability to hurl a baseball at more than 90 miles an hour – having never been coached – was sufficiently impressive for the competition’s backers to pay for his passage to the US.

The pair will report to the Pirates’ training complex next month to prepare for spring training. Their success has already sparked a small-scale frenzy for baseball in India, a land more usually associated with cricket.

Bramhadin Singh, Mr Singh’s father, said: “With telephonic guidance from Rinku, youths in our village have already started practising seriously to become million-dollar pitchers like Rinku.”

“He was often dubbed a loafer because he played sport,” Mr Singh’s mother, Antaraja Devi, told a local paper. “Now every villager prays for a loafer like him.”

In truth, however, the “Million-Dollar” tag is misleading – for the time being, at least. After winning the competition, Mr Singh and Mr Patel auditioned for more than 30 Major League teams. The Pirates signed both last month for bonus amounts not exceeding $10,000 each – sums that suggest interest in the pair was minimal.

A certain amount of cynicism on the part of American team bosses is justified. The first thing that the pair did on learning that they had been signed up by the Pirates was to go online to find out where Pittsburgh was, according to their blog. They brushed up on their English, it is said, by watching baseball games on cable TV – through which they encountered key terms such as “curveball” and “strike” for the first time.

While in recent seasons Japanese and South American players have made inroads at baseball’s highest levels, other efforts to expand the game’s horizons have met mixed success. In 1992, the California Angels scouted the former Soviet Union to search for talent, calling the region “baseball’s last frontier”. The team signed three players, none of whom shone and all of whom were released from their contracts soon after.

Last year the New York Yankees signed two Chinese players, the left-hander Kai Liu and the catcher Zhen-wang Zhang. The move was widely seen as a marketing exercise and so far neither has made it to a Minor League game.

Perhaps learning from those lessons, the Pirates, who have struggled in recent seasons, are not claiming that their Indian imports will transform the team’s performance overnight. Indeed, the side looks to be playing a much longer game, one with an eye to future television deals as well as a potentially massive talent pool.

The Pirates’ general manager, Neal Huntington, said: “A billion people are going to take a curiosity in what these two young men do. It sends a message internationally.

“And India has the background of cricket, with the muscle memory there for throwing.”

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