Can Pirates rookies help baseball go global?

Two Pittsburgh Pirate rookies — one from South Africa and one from Lithuania — could help MLB make inroads in non-traditional baseball markets.

The Pirates made history this week when they promoted the first Lithuanian-born and the first African-born player to the majors.

Pitcher Dovydas Neverauskas and second baseman Gift Ngoepe are not likely to become stars, but each could have a positive effect on MLB’s efforts to promote the game’s growth in Europe and Africa.

“This doesn’t mean that suddenly everyone in South Africa is going to start playing or watching baseball, and certainly not in Lithuania,” said Lincoln Mitchell, author of “Will Big League Baseball Survive?”, a book that examines the globalization of the sport. “But it does increase the possibility of that happening. And if either of these players breaks through, that changes everything.”

Mitchell points to the example of Golden State Warriors center Zaza Pachulia, who has made the Warriors everybody’s favorite team in his native country of Georgia.

Basketball is already popular in Lithuania, so baseball faces bigger hurdles in getting on the radar in Lithuania and South Africa. But smaller countries looking for sports heroes offer opportunities to hook fans.

“You’re not going to generate excitement by a Lithuanian team going to the World Baseball Classic,” Mitchell said. “But if a Lithuanian pitcher ends up on the Cubs and pitches two shutout innings in Game 7, even Lithuanians can understand what that means and will be excited about it.”

Something like that happened in 1996. When Graeme Lloyd pitched 2 2/3 scoreless innings and picked up a win for the New York Yankees in the World Series, it created substantial buzz in his native Australia.

Can Ngoepe and Neverauskas have that kind of impact?

“If the South African player (Ngoepe) plays two weeks in the majors then gets sent down, it’s not much of a story,” Mitchell says. “But if he lasts, if he hits, is he promoted? How you reach out to South African media about this, how do you get him to go back and do things? How do you take this opportunity to run a few baseball clinics, to do a goodwill tour? There are ways to do this right, and I think MLB is actually pretty good that. so we’ll see.

Ngoepe had a hit in first big league at-bat Thursday. In the Pittsburgh dugout, Ngoepe’s teammates screamed, “For the motherland!”

The slick-fielding infielder was born in South Africa and raised in a room inside the clubhouse of the Randburg Mets Baseball Club in Johannesburg. The Pirates discovered him at baseball academy in Italy.

“You’re not going to turn up the next Barry Bonds in some housing development in Johannesburg,” he said. “But the nature of baseball is these skills are highly specific and you can find them.”

Neverauskas‘ native Lithuania, where soccer is king, is an even more of a challenge. But it’s not impossible to think baseball could gain some interest there.

“If you try to bring baseball to the continent of Europe, you’re going to fail,” Mitchell said. “But if you try to chip off a country here or there, you could succeed.”