Baseball in India

by Everett Evers

Editor’s Note: Way back in the third year of Baseball Diary, Everett “Ev” Evers began a series of articles regarding baseball around the world. His first report concerned baseball in Afghanistan, and he filed several more in the ensuing years. We are thrilled that he has come out of “retirement” to send us this completely new entry in the series.

The small plane landed with a hop and a thud, braked hard on the short runway, throwing the few passengers forward in their seats, then coasted for a few minutes huffing and puffing until stopping with a lurch by the tumble-down, one-story terminal. Shouts from outside as the passenger door opened, and almost immediately the cabin was transformed into a tropical sauna, the dense water-laden air smelling vaguely of gasoline and rotting vegetation. The rickety staircase was rolled up to the plane and, the last passenger out, squinting against the brilliant sun, I descended carefully to the tarmac, the heat-cracked asphalt sticky in the oppressive heat. At last I was back in India.

It had been many years since I last visited the land of Bharata, as the natives call it, there to help establish the 6-team league that had since expanded to nine or 10 teams (it wasn’t at all clear from the reports I received exactly how many teams there were. Apparently at least one team, from Benares, had continual financial worries, its players forced to go begging for their salaries). But here in Gorakshapur, baseball had captured the imagination of the locals and had, in that typical Indian way, been elevated in the fans’ minds into a kind of spiritual exercise, the games themselves into a cross between a solemn public ritual and free-for-all celebration that more than once had ended in mass rioting. Though the smallest market in the league, the Trishulas (a Sanskrit word meaning “trident”) had established themselves as the powerhouse of the All-India Base Ball Playing League (AIBBPL), the equivalent of our major leagues.

Since the league’s inception 20 years ago, the Tris have been champion 12 or 14 times, depending on how you defined a “year” and “champion.” Appropriately, as the "New York Yankees of India," the team right now had the greatest player in Indian baseball history, center fielder Ashok Narayan, called the “Mickey Mantle of India,” because of his position, his switch-hitting, his speed on the base paths, but most of all his prodigious go-for-broke power. With Shoky, as he was called, it was either a home run or strike out, singles were considered beneath his dignity and in fact he often refused to run out a clean hit, simply turning and walking back to the dugout in disgust as the outfielder flipped the ball in to the first baseman to record the out. He even wore Mantle’s number 7 on occasion, when the moon and stars were aligned in a particular manner, otherwise he wore 65, 43, or on extremely propitious days, 109.

Entering the terminal I was immediately accosted by the hordes of cab wallahs hungering for a fare. Suh, suh, came the chorus of cries, here, here, their arms waving madly, some at the periphery of the crowd trying to push their way forward to claim my attention. But I would have none of them; my ride was already arranged. Though the crowd pressed in on me from every side, I could see him standing calmly off to one side, his blue-and-white vintage Brooklyn Dodger hat (worn properly with the bill forward) contrasting sharply with the many sweat-soaked green-yellow-and-pink caps with the distinctive orange “T” of the beloved Tris. Indra smiled as I forced my way through the throng (Suh, suh, here, here), and soon we were in his old ‘58 Arjuna and on our way to the hotel. We had a lot of catching up to do as we weaved across G-pur, avoiding the buzzing swarm of recklessly piloted motor scooters, the unheeding pedestrians wandering in and out of the traffic wherever their whims might take them, the slow moving bicycle rickshaws, their drivers hollering at each other, shaking their fists in anger, and of course the ubiquitous cows, doing just what cows are meant to do except in India, not in a pasture but right smack in the middle of the street.

To Be Continued