Channel Management

Building a baseball movement in cricket-crazy India for Major League Baseball

Services

Challenge

In India, baseball wasn’t just a niche sport — it was virtually invisible. With no live broadcasts, limited grassroots infrastructure, and zero cultural connection, our client Major League Baseball India faced the challenge of introducing an unfamiliar sport to a massive but saturated market. Cricket dominated every field, feed, and front page.

To succeed, Engage needed to do more than just introduce the sport. It needed to build awareness, affinity, and digital engagement from the ground up.

Solution

We introduced baseball to Indian audiences through a digital-first engagement strategy that was as much about sparking curiosity as it was about building long-term fandom. The brief was simple on paper but daunting in practice: take a sport with almost no cultural visibility in India and make it feel engaging, entertaining, and, most importantly, relevant. So we created various social content formats designed to break down the game in playful, digestible ways.

Did You Know gave audiences quirky, shareable facts. Baseball 101 introduced the rules in a way that felt made for the Reels generation. Best Plays showcased the sport’s natural drama, while Festive Wishes tied baseball into India’s vibrant cultural calendar. All of this was produced in regional languages, ensuring the sport felt inclusive and approachable to audiences far beyond the metros.

But snackable content alone wasn’t enough to build real emotional connection. To deepen that bond, we created Diamonds in the Rough — a 12-episode original video series spotlighting India’s baseball scene and grassroot players. Filmed across eight locations in four languages, it told the stories of players, coaches, and communities who pursued baseball against the odds. This raw storytelling connected with audiences far beyond core sports fans, delivering over 8 million views and 100,000 engagements, and connected fans to the human side of baseball.

To give this new wave of fans a permanent home we launched MLB India’s Instagram page, creating a dedicated hub for fans, and amplified the campaigns through PR outreach, syndication, and paid media to ensure maximum visibility. With over 300 pieces of content and three million people reached, it laid the foundation for a new kind of fandom.

What started as an almost invisible sport in India quickly grew into a community of curious and connected fans. By blending education, culture, and storytelling we built the foundation for a new kind of fandom in one of the world’s most competitive sports markets.