MLB is increasing its efforts to make inroads in India. <\/p>\n
The league announced Wednesday a collaboration with the Reliance Initiative for Sports and Entertainment (RISE), highlighted by a live event that will take place in Mumbai in October. MLB\u2019s collab with RISE will also include marketing, social media and commercial initiatives, with a focus on growing baseball fandom via fan engagement initiatives, original content and grassroots programming. <\/p>\n
\u201cFor us, it\u2019s a long-term play,\u201d MLB SVP\/Global Operations and Events Jeremiah Yolkut told SBJ of the league\u2019s investment in India. \u201cWe\u2019re not looking a year out. We\u2019re probably looking at 5-10 years out. And our intent is that as India becomes more of a player on the international sports and business landscape, MLB wants to be present in the market.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s interest from India to host a future Olympics and bring other world events to the country. And the economic upside in India is strong. We\u2019re going to develop the game there and see where it takes us.\u201d <\/p>\n
RISE, a sports and entertainment company with a wide-range of specializations in the industry, including sponsorship consulting, athlete management and marketing and media rights management, is a subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a massive conglomerate in India. <\/p>\n
The league already has a broadcast deal with JioStar, which is controlled by RIL, and has shown postseason games on TV. Mukesh Ambani, who has a net worth of nearly $100B according to Forbes, is chairman of RIL. <\/p>\n
\u201cIndia has been on our radar for the last five or six years as an area of potential growth,\u201d Yolkut said, given the similarities between its No. 1 sport — cricket — and baseball. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to have a varied portfolio of international opportunities. India is sort of in the developing stages, and we\u2019re testing the waters by creating opportunities for us to bring live events, in addition to developing the youth space.\u201d <\/p>\n
MLB has had an office in New Delhi since 2019, with two fulltime staffers. <\/p>\n
In 2023, the league did a four-part documentary called Indian Baseball Dreams, which explored the rise of first-generation Indian-American Arjun Nimmala\u2019s journey to being drafted in the first round by the Blue Jays. A year later, there was a Hot Shots hitting competition in the country, featuring cricket star Shikhar Dhawan and former MLBer Adam Jones. <\/p>\n
In India, there are 160 teams that participate in the MLB Cup youth baseball tournament. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere are over 2,000 players now in the country,\u201d Yolkut said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t sound like a big number, but when you\u2019re starting from zero it\u2019s pretty good growth.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MLB is increasing its efforts to make inroads in India. The league announced Wednesday a collaboration with the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":350017,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,4034,591,85],"class_list":["post-683205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-baseball","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=683205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/350017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=683205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=683205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=683205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}