MLB’s first Lithuanian learned the game where few play
The decades-long journey of a father and a son, of a game and a country, ended with a sprint.
When Dovydas Neverauskas — fresh from the airport and wearing cleats and a glove bummed from his new Pittsburgh Pirates teammates — jogged onto the mound at PNC Park on April 24 to clean up what was left a lopsided loss to the Chicago Cubs, the 24-year-old reliever became the first Lithuanian player in Major League Baseball history.
Halfway across the world in the middle of the night, Virmidas Neverauskas stared as his laptop as his boy — the tall kid with the No. 66 on his jersey — started firing fastballs that topped out in the upper 90s against the World Series champions. Two innings. Two hits. One run. One strikeout. The family odyssey that began in communist Russia, moved across Europe and led to a slow ascent through Pittsburgh’s minor league system was complete.
“All the emotions,’’ Virmidas Neverauskas said from his home in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, some 4,500 miles and seven time zones away, a place where there are no baseball diamonds and most kids grow up wanting to be international basketball stars. “This has been my dream. This has been his dream.’’
One the father could hardly have imagined when he was in college in February 1986 and noticed a flyer looking for athletes join the Soviet Union’s fledgling baseball program shortly after the International Olympic Committee announced the sport would make its Olympic debut at the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona.
Until then, America’s national pastime had been ignored in the USSR, “a sport for capitalists, not socialists,’’ as Virmidas put it.
Still, the Soviets wanted to keep up appearances. And so Virmidas headed to the local library, where he found a book that tried to explain the history of the game. Virmidas sat there thumbing the pages, baffled.
“The person who translated the rules, he knows English but doesn’t know baseball,’’ he said.
Then again, neither did anybody else. There was no baseball equipment in the early days. The players poked a hole in tennis balls and filled them with water to mimic the weight of a baseball. They only had two mitts, both bummed from a local ice hockey goalie. Still, they kept at it. There was something about swinging a bat and watching a ball soar into the sky that stuck with Virmidas.