What will it take for Yan Gomes to make Brazil a baseball hotbed?
In 1997, a 20-year-old from Barranquilla, Colombia, shocked the world when he lined a single off Cleveland Indians ace Charles Nagy to score the winning run from third to give the Marlins the World Series title.
That 20-year-old was Edgar Renteria in Game 7 of the World Series. At the time, Renteria was only the fifth Colombia native in history to appear in the majors. Since Renteria’s retirement, MLB has seen an influx of Colombia-born players, including Gio Urshela, Julio Teheran, Oscar Mercado and Jose Quintana among others.
Now in 2019, Major League Baseball is at a similar inflection point with Brazil and Washington Nationals catcher Yan Gomes.
Much like Renteria, the hope is that Gomes can help change Brazil, an equally soccer-crazy country, into the next baseball hotbed. Despite the number of firsts that Gomes has accomplished, that will not be the case.
Part of helping change the landscape of how a sport is received is through marketing, both by the player and the league.
Yan Gomes will always hold a special place in Major League Baseball history as the first native of Brazil to play in the big leagues. The veteran catcher is a trailblazer, but it’s unclear whether he’ll ever convert the land of the beautiful game into a baseball hotbed.
In many ways, he’s the John Harkes of Major League Baseball. If you don’t know who Harkes is, you can appreciate how difficult it will be for Gomes to transform a soccer-mad country into a baseball one.
In 1993, Harkes became the first American to score a goal in the English Premier League, arguably the best soccer league in the world. Nineteen years later, Gomes became the first Brazilian to play in the majors. It will take time, perhaps a couple decades, but there’s reason to believe that Gomes’ success in the majors will help further Brazil’s interest in baseball.
To be clear, nobody is saying that Gomes will start stealing headlines from Neymar, the soccer superstar, or any of Brazil’s national team stars. Yet, his return to the postseason with the Nationals a year after becoming the first Brazilian MLB All-Star will continue to spread the baseball gospel in his South American country.
The further the Nationals go in the playoffs, the more MLB will garner some headlines in Brazil because of Gomes.
Gomes, who was 12 when his family moved to the United States, truly understood how important he was to his countrymen when he made his debut with the Toronto Blue Jays on May 17, 2012.
He only needed to look up into the stands to see the Brazilian flags that most American fans only see on television during the FIFA World Cup.
“When I got there, I realized how much it meant, not just for me, for my family, but for a whole country,” he told La Vida Baseball. “You know Brazilian flags were everywhere in Toronto. It was a really emotional day for my family and I.”
Gomes doesn’t have much of a social media following. Heck, he doesn’t have much of a social media presence. Compared to many of his contemporaries, he’s rather silent on Instagram and Twitter.
His lack of a social media presence is one major reason to believe that he won’t help transform Brazil into a baseball country.
If he succeeds in the playoffs, though, his lack of a social media presence won’t hurt him back home in Brazil. The São Paulo native’s exploits will be chronicled back home on television and newspapers whether he tweets anything or not.
He’s the only Brazilian in the MLB postseason, so it’s fair to say that much of the attention Brazilian media while pay to the postseason will be focused on Gomes.
More importantly, he accepts the challenge to help grow the game back home.
The reaction to his debut in the majors is all he needed to serve as a reminder that his Brazilian brothers and sisters are watching back home and around the world.
“To this day, I still don’t quite realize how much that meant to Brazil,” Gomes told La Vida Baseball last year. “I was running out to my position and, while I’m taking it all in, I look up to the second deck and there’s a big ‘Welcome Gomes’ sign with a Brazilian flag on it.
“It definitely took some ease off me, and I was just excited to be there at the time. I kept looking around because when you’re in a moment like that you just try to take it all in. I was looking around, and there were Brazilian flags everywhere.”
Brazil is watching the MLB postseason in large part because Gomes, a veteran catcher, is playing for the Nationals. He may not be among the marquee names in the playoffs, but he’s an important figure in Brazil.
You never know who’s watching, but the first step to growing the game is to make sure fans are watching. In that regard, Gomes has already made it possible for kids in soccer-mad Brazil to know that playing in the major leagues is possible.
Featured Image: Yan Gomes Instagram