top of page
Search

From the shores of Lake Victoria comes a dreamer with a cannon arm

Writer's picture: The San Juan Daily StarThe San Juan Daily Star


Armstrong Muhoozi, seen here with his grandmother and mother in Jinja, Uganda, signed a seven-year minor league contract with the Pittsburgh Pirates last week. (X via Antonio Torres)
Armstrong Muhoozi, seen here with his grandmother and mother in Jinja, Uganda, signed a seven-year minor league contract with the Pittsburgh Pirates last week. (X via Antonio Torres)

By The Star Staff


For the last six months, Armstrong Muhoozi has been putting in the work, lugging his baseball equipment about a mile uphill from his ramshackle home to a rutted, bumpy field at Masese Co-Education Primary School. Sometimes, he makes this dusty trek twice a day, committed to perfecting his backhand on ground balls, creating separation between his upper and lower half on swings off the tee, and strengthening his already laserlike arm through a regimen of drills.


Muhoozi, 17, also hoofs it to a local gym where, for the equivalent of $1.35 a session, he rotates through a set of explosive medicine ball throws, dynamic shoulder exercises and increasingly heavy squats.


At night, he lies on a mattress on the floor of a room he shares with his mother, five siblings and cousin, the glow of his phone on his face as he scours the internet for video breakdowns of the swing of his idol, Mike Trout.


Last Wednesday, when teenagers across the globe joined MLB organizations on the first day of the international signing period, those family members — as well as uncles, aunts, more cousins, his grandmother and his teammates — gathered in a completely different setting: a celebratory boat cruise on the Nile River.


An hour later, the family crowded around an L-shaped table at a restaurant in his hometown, Jinja, a city of 93,000 about 60 miles east of Kampala, Uganda’s capital. Wearing a crisp white jersey while sitting in front of a banner featuring the black and gold logos of his new club and the black, red, and gold flag of Uganda, Muhoozi, who projects as an infielder, meticulously printed his name on a contract with the Pittsburgh Pirates. His signing bonus of $45,000 is almost 70 times the median annual income of his fellow Ugandans.


For Muhoozi, just the fifth player from this East African nation to sign with an MLB organization and the second position player, signing a seven-year minor league deal is the first step in what he hopes will be a baseball journey that takes him from a makeshift field overlooking the Nile halfway around the world to the banks of the Allegheny.


At a hair under 5-foot-10, Muhoozi is not a hulking, can’t-miss specimen. Living in Uganda — where baseball remains largely unknown, fields and equipment remain scarce, and leagues and teams are haphazard and irregular — he has not run the gantlet of high-level pitching that American players in travel leagues have been battling through their teenage years. It is not obvious at first glance why he will soon be boarding a plane for the Pirates’ Dominican complex. But he quickly makes it clear.


Muhooz has a cannon of an arm: He long tosses the length of a football field before he crow-hops to a pitcher’s screen, uncorking balls that register over 95 mph on hand-held radar guns. He sprints past corn stalks that line the outfield and then smacks soft-toss balls on a beeline toward mooing cows.


Muhoozi’s tools came to the attention of the Pirates international scout Tom Gillespie, who watched the prospect on a video early last year. He was intrigued enough that he made plans to spend three days with Muhoozi on his next trip to Africa several months later.


“I could see the explosiveness. I could see the quickness and the bat speed, and I was like, those things will translate,” Gillespie said.


Uganda might seem a surprising place for baseball talent to blossom. Most of the population has never seen a baseball field. And yet here, where roughly half of the population lives in poverty, there’s an academy run by baseball’s richest team, the Los Angeles Dodgers.


The academy, known to players and coaches simply as “the complex,” is behind a blue-and-white painted wall in Mpigi, 85 miles west of Jinja. The only one of its kind in Uganda, the complex is similar to the academies major league organizations have in the Dominican Republic: A combination academic and baseball school, where players live, go to class, and compete with one another from their preteen years through high school.


Baseball was introduced in Uganda in the 1990s by coaches from the United States and Japan. In 2002, Richard Stanley, an American chemical engineer and a former part-owner of the New York Yankees’ then-Class AA affiliate Trenton Thunder, helped start a Little League program in the country. He began a program that would lead to the building of a baseball academy, the Allen VR Stanley Secondary School. Players from the school would make up a team that traveled to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to compete in the 2015 Little League World Series. Much of the school became the Dodgers’ academy in 2019.


Baseball grew in other pockets around the country, too: In Luwero, for example, two hours north of Kampala, there are multiple primary school fields where as many as 50 children gather each day to practice. Those fields have produced three of the four other players who have signed with MLB organizations: Ben Serunkuma and Umar Male, who signed with the Dodgers in 2022, and David Matoma, a Pirates prospect who signed in 2023.


Muhoozi says his four years at the academy, which started in January 2020 when he was 12, were a godsend.


“That’s where I got to grow big,” he said. “I ate well. I slept well.”


As a young child, Muhoozi walked a half-mile to the Jinja Army Primary Boarding School each morning. One day in May 2019, representatives from the Dodgers held a tryout there. It was the first time Muhoozi had ever held a baseball or swung a bat.


“The bat was really heavy,” Muhoozi said. “It felt awkward. I wasn’t hitting the balls because everything was different from what I expected — I was used to playing cricket.”


Still, Dodgers scouts liked what they saw. The next year, Muhoozi was at the complex.


With Gillespie’s assurance that he would be signed this month, Muhoozi quit the academy, forgoing the exams he would need to pass to graduate. He headed home to Jinja to work and wait for his signing day, trekking up and down the hill to Masese school, and peppering Gillespie and others with videos and texts asking them to critique his swing and fielding form.


Gillespie thinks Muhoozi could be a second or third baseman, but with his speed and arm, he could wind up in center field. Muhoozi’s work ethic and coachability, combined with his talent, convinced Gillespie that he was the best Ugandan position player prospect he had ever scouted.


“Anytime he’s given any advice, he goes and tries to put it into practice right away, and does that effectively,” Gillespie said. “Whatever his environment is, every day he wakes up and he tries to figure out how he’s going to get better.”


In a matter of days, that setting will be the Pirates’ 46-acre Dominican complex in El Toro.


And when Muhoozi returns home to Jinja, he has another focus: to use his signing bonus to build his mother a house.


“My dream is to make her happy,” he said. “Being poor isn’t a bad thing, but it gives you motivation so that you push yourself an extra mile.”

37 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


bottom of page