The story reads like one of Bollywood’s less credible scripts: two struggling javelin throwers from impoverished Indian villages have been plucked from obscurity to become star pitchers for a Major League American baseball team.

Dinesh Patel, 19, a right-hander, and Rinku Singh, a 20-year-old lefty, may never have played a competitive baseball game in their lives, but on the strength of their performances on a reality TV competition they have been signed by the Pittsburgh Pirates, the five-time World Series Champions. In the process they are thought to have become the first Indian citizens to sign a contract with a major US team in any sport.

Rinku, the son of a truck driver and the youngest of nine chilren, won the “Million Dollar Arm” competition by throwing a baseball faster and more accurately than 30,000 other contestants from across the subcontinent. The feat earned him a $100,000 cash prize, six months intensive coaching and the opportunity to try out for America’s leading baseball teams.

Dinesh, who was brought up in a dusty village in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh by his uncle and grandmother after his parents found that they could not afford to raise him, fouled his competition throw.

However, his ability to hurl a baseball at more than 90 miles an hour — having never been coached — was sufficiently impressive for the competition’s backers to pay for his passage to the US, too.

The pair’s success has already sparked a small-scale frenzy for baseball in India, a land more usually associated with cricket.

Bramhadin Singh, Rinku’s father, said: “With telephonic guidance from Rinku, youths in our village have already started practising seriously, to become million-dollar pitchers like Rinku.”

“He was often dubbed a loafer because he played sport,” Rinku’s mother Antaraja Devi told a local paper. “Now every villager prays for a loafer like him.”

In truth, however, the “Million Dollar” moniker is misleading — for the time being, at least. After winning the competition, Rinku and Dinesh auditioned for more than 30 major league teams this autumn.

The Pirates signed both last month for bonus amounts not exceeding $10,000 each — sums that suggest interest in the pair was minimal.

A certain amount of cynicism on the part of American team bosses is justified. The first thing Rinku and Dinesh did on learning they had been signed up by the Pittsburgh Pirates was go online to find out where Pittsburgh was, according to their blog.

They brushed up on their English, it is said, by watching baseball games on cable TV — through which they encountered key terms such as “curveball” and “strike” for the first time.

The Pirates general manager Neal Huntington said: “A billion people are going to take a curiosity in what these two young men do. It sends a message internationally. “And India has the background of cricket, with the muscle memory there for throwing.”