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Dennis Kasumba
Dennis Kasumba dreams of reaching the major leagues.
For now, this past month was close enough — when the 5-foot-6 catcher from Uganda had a chance to play for the Frederick Keys of the MLB Draft League.
“When I’m here, I get a lot of experience,” the 19-year-old Kasumba said this week. “I play the game with good pitchers, I get good coaches. When I go (back) to Uganda, I think I’ll get a team to play in the U.S. again next season.”
That’s the hope for Kasumba — that step by step, he’ll be able to stay on this journey wherever it leads. His past few weeks with Frederick showed how daunting the goal of reaching the majors really is, but just making it this far is a testament to his perseverance. It also exemplifies how social media can open doors for people who might otherwise go unnoticed — a teenaged baseball player in Africa, for example.
“I think social media is different right now. We not only see it in baseball, I think we saw it in people singing, artists, actors from another country that, say 15 years ago, we didn’t know anything about them, and social media helped them to expose themselves, helped people see them,” said René Rivera, a former big-league catcher who was Kasumba’s manager at Frederick. “I like that you can be yourself and share your history on social media, so people recognize you and give you opportunity.”
That’s how Joshua Williams, an Atlanta-based attorney, first came across Kasumba. “About two years ago, I saw he had made a post on social media,” Williams said. “He was hitting a ball off of a coke can that was attached to a tire.” Kasumba’s Twitter account is full of posts like that, showing him using all sorts of creative training methods. In one, he pops out of his catcher’s crouch again and again, throwing blocks instead of baseballs. In another, he’s weightlifting, using a bar with two tires on it. The videos show Kasumba putting quite a bit of work in — often in wet, muddy conditions — and refusing to let a lack of equipment stop him. “I don’t want to give excuse,” Kasumba said. “That’s why I said, ’Oh, I need to use tires as weights,’ to get muscle, to build my muscles.”
I recommend reading the whole article and googling up some of the social media posts. I put him on the O's for the screenshot as the Frederick Keys were a Baltimore affiliate at one time. Remember with these very young players that you may need to add the BBR Historical ID to the player if OOTP doesn't yet have it in there.
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