After brief stint in US, Ugandan baseball hopeful eager for his next chance

FREDERICK, Md. — 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.”

Orphaned at a young age, Kasumba grew up with his grandmother, and he says he puts his heart into baseball because he wants to change her life and his. Williams is one of several people who tried to help Kasumba come to the United States. Williams says a private high school in Florida offered to let Kasumba finish his senior year there and play baseball, but his visa was denied.

Then Sean Campbell, the executive director of the MLB Draft League, reached out. Williams said he'd never heard of the league when Kasumba's coach in Uganda told him about the offer.

“I shot Sean an email and was like, ‘Who are you and is this real?’” Williams said.

It was real. The six-team MLB Draft League is set up to help players try to improve their stock in the weeks leading up to the amateur draft. Teams play 30 games in the first half of the season, which ended this week. In the second half, the league uses professionals who have exhausted amateur eligibility.

After Kasumba at last had a visa application accepted, he was able to come play in Frederick. He had some national team experience in Uganda, but the competition in the U.S. was on a different level. He went 0 for 19 with 15 strikeouts for Frederick at the plate — and behind it, his inexperience occasionally showed, especially when the man on the mound was struggling with his control. In Monday night’s game, Frederick pitchers were charged with eight wild pitches in the first three innings.

“We have to understand that, pitching-wise, here and Africa is so much different, so it’s a process to adjust on the guy throwing 95, 96, 98,” Rivera said. “But catching-wise, he got a lot better — setup, catching the ball, catching 98 miles per hour fastball.”

Lately, Kasumba's Twitter workouts have looked a lot fancier — in one video, he's lifting dumbbells in a swimming pool.

Kasumba’s tenure with the Keys ended this week, but Rivera is hoping he'll be back in the United States before too long.

“His visa was only for the first half,” Rivera said. “He still has to go back to Uganda and finish high school, and once he finish high school, we hope, and I know the president of the league and myself, we’re doing the best to try and find a junior college, that he can come and he can play baseball.”

Kasumba's pursuit is perhaps best summed up by a line that's appeared in several of his tweets:

"I don’t let where I come from stop me from dreaming big.”

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Follow Noah Trister at https://twitter.com/noahtrister