When I was much younger, I followed only one team with any consistency—the Pittsburgh Pirates.

In those days, and I’m dating myself here, players stayed with one team for their entire careers, barring a trade. It was easy to know who would be playing where for the Pirates. Roberto Clemente would be in right field and hitting third. Willie Stargell would be at first base or left field and hit cleanup. Donn Clendenon would bat fifth and play first base. Gene Alley, a Richmond native, was the shortstop and Bill Mazeroski, followed by Dave Cash, played second base. Then, there was Maury Wills, for a brief time, Manny Sanguillen, Jim Pagliaroni, Bob Robertson, Matty Alou, Dave Parker, Bob Veale, Vernon Law, Dock Ellis, Elroy Face, Dave Guisti, Steve Blass, Bob Moose, and a host of others.

I followed the Pirates with some consistency through college. Then came marriage, full-time jobs and children. Combine all that with seemingly unfettered free agency, and you tend to lose track of who is playing where.

About all I can tell you about the Pirates now, without doing some research, is that they lose far more often than they win.

So I found it interesting that they are the team that signed the pitchers, Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel, from India who were discovered in the “Million Dollar Arm” search.

Singh earned $100,000 in the contest, Patel $2,500. Neither has ever played in a baseball game before.

The Pirates are taking a chance here, and you can’t blame them for that. It’s not as if the traditional method of finding pitchers has worked out so well.

This idea of finding players in India seemed silly to me at first. But there are a billion people there. Somewhere on the sub-continent, there probably is a young man with the ability to throw 100-mile-an-hour fastballs, with some movement on them. But with no organized baseball there, finding that young man is going to be difficult. Then, training him to play a game that is entirely new is another challenge.

We’ll see how this works out for the Pirates.

Here are links to three videos on the Million Dollar Arm search.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64lanlEb0Ys

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMd-eRLJ4PE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjnBy0sF-Bc

The Pittsburgh Pirates go non-traditional