When the Pakistani national baseball team arrived in Brooklyn, this week, to play in a qualifying round of the World Baseball Classic, it was the first time in a year that its players had set foot on a regulation baseball diamond. There are no real baseball fields at all in Pakistan, apart from two tucked away at the U.S. Embassy, in Islamabad. To practice in their home country, the team has carved out base paths on a local soccer field and mashed bricks into the earth to simulate the rubber of a pitching mound.
The World Baseball Classic, held every four years, was founded in 2005 as a World Cup-like tournament of nations intended to grow the game’s popularity in places where kids have little access to the sport, and little incentive to take it up. Several nations have since cobbled together squads consisting largely of Americans representing their grandparents’ homelands, to better compete with baseball’s powerhouses: the U.S., Japan, and several Latin American countries. The other three teams competing in Brooklyn—Brazil, Israel, and Great Britain—are, like Pakistan, from the outermost rings of the baseball universe, but they have teams studded with pro players. The Pakistani team is homegrown.
Almost all of the players are former cricketers, with nominal jobs in the Pakistani Army, the local police forces, or the national electric company, which allow them time to compete in tournaments. Muhammad Zawar, twenty-eight, was an accomplished cricket player in his home town in Punjab, but while in college, in 2012, he surprised his friends and teammates by taking up baseball. He says he earns twenty thousand rupees a month, or about two hundred dollars, in return for playing center field for the electric company. As an added perk, he gets free power in his home, which bumps his earnings a bit.
I spoke with Zawar earlier this week, on the day before his team’s first tournament game. Dressed in their crisp green-and-white practice jerseys, the players were stretched out on the artificial turf of the minor-league Brooklyn Cyclones’ stadium, in Coney Island. The team that wins the Brooklyn bracket, the last of four qualifying rounds, will make it to the main W.B.C. draw, in March, 2017. Along the left-field fence, the serpentine Thunderbolt roller coaster looped and corkscrewed its way from the foul pole, behind the scoreboard, and toward the beach beyond center field. Once the team was limber, John Goulding, one of the team’s two American coaches, gathered the players to go over the practice plan. When he was done, they recited a verse from the Koran and sprinted onto the field.
Goulding, a retired high-school coach from northern California, coached numerous big-league players, including Barry Bonds, when they were in high school, but his most important qualification is that he was willing to go to Pakistan. Team officials reached out to dozens of professional coaches suggested by Major League Baseball but received only moderate interest. Those who were willing to help guide the team would only do it in the U.S. But booking airfare and hotel rooms for dozens of players to fly seven thousand miles to spend the winter training in Florida was far beyond the team’s budget—they were already struggling to meet the everyday needs of a baseball team, like bats and balls. Anytime friends and relatives travelled abroad, they were asked to stuff their suitcases on the way back with bats, balls, and gloves. To make its equipment last longer, the team saves its best gear for live games and international competitions. For daily use, players get knockoff baseball bats and balls, made in the local market for a fraction of the cost.
What Pakistan lacks in natural resources it makes up for in manpower. When baseball was first brought to Pakistan, in 1992, the coaches learned the game by watching videos of major-league games and reading books that helped teach the nuances of the sport. Without any history of success or any money to create it, the team has still managed to rise in the world rankings, to No. 23, of a hundred and twenty nations. The key is cricket players. The baseball federation went about turning bowlers into pitchers and batsman into hitters, convincing young cricketers to give up on Pakistan’s national pastime and try America’s instead.
In Brooklyn, the team wrapped up its final workout with batting practice. It was their first time in a batting cage—they’d never used a pitching machine before. Balls were grounded through the infield and sprayed around the shallow outfield. Then Goulding offered a pep talk. “Tomorrow is the biggest day of your life,” he told the team. “We’re going to represent Pakistan in a great way. We need to take it one pitch at a time and control our emotions out there.”
“Inshallah,” the players replied, before heading to the clubhouse. “I’m nervous for them,” Goulding told me. “I don’t think they have any idea what they’re up against.”
On Thursday afternoon, they were up against the twenty-nine-year-old pitcher Jean Tome, who spent three seasons with the Seattle Mariners organization before going back to Brazil to play. An hour before the scheduled first pitch, the P.A. announcer practiced the pronunciation of each player’s name with a Pakistani official, as Pakistani pop songs blared from stadium speakers. The stadium seats were still mostly empty when, after a set of three national anthems, Zawar stepped into the batter’s box. The bench cheered in unison: “Pakistan Zindabad!” Zawar fouled off the first pitch of the game, took a ball, and then laced a line drive up the middle for a single.
Neither team scored in the first couple of innings, but in the bottom of the third Brazil settled down at the plate and tallied three runs on four hits, including a bases-clearing triple by the New York Yankees’ top draft pick in 2011, Dante Bichette, Jr., whose father played in the majors for more than a decade. Brazil scratched out another run in the fourth inning and two more in the fifth, and after six innings Pakistan was down 6–0—an uphill climb, for sure, but not insurmountable. A scout for the Baltimore Orioles assessed Pakistan’s team this way: it doesn’t have any major-league talent, but, given what the matchup looked like on paper, its play was an impressive surprise.
In the bottom of the seventh, though, Brazil scored four more runs, triggering a ten-run mercy rule: the game was over. Pakistan had managed four hits and committed one error. After the game, the Pakistani players, frustrated, huddled in the outfield. The head of the Pakistan Baseball Federation congratulated the team on its effort and told the players to regroup for their next game, on Friday night, against Great Britain. A loss would mean Pakistan would be eliminated. “We’re close,” he told them. “You made some mistakes, but you looked like professionals out there.” And, from every vantage point in the stadium besides the Pakistan dugout, that looked like a win.
