First pitch goes viral, reaches fever pitch

Move over, guy who makes baskets from the top of football stadiums for the enjoyment of YouTube viewers. Company has arrived.

It arrived Monday night at Petco Park in San Diego, in the form of a traditional first pitch at a ballgame that was anything but traditional.

It was a few minutes past 7 when a Brazilian acrobat named Gabryel Nogueira da Silva, who has spent the past five years in Las Vegas performing in the Cirque du Soleil show "KA" at the MGM Grand, threw out the ceremonial first pitch by which all future ceremonial first pitches will be measured.

Standing with a foot on the rubber, exactly 60 feet, 6 inches -- or, as he put it, "about 20 meters" -- from home plate, da Silva leaped and twisted into the air, contorting his bronzed and buffed body into something resembling a thrill ride at Magic Mountain. He did a 360 -- and there also might have been a pirouette and a jack knife and a Hamill-Camel spin thrown in, to increase the degree of difficulty and impress the French judge -- before he nailed a perfect landing, took a split second to gather himself, then delivered a perfect strike to one of the Padres' seldom-used setup relief pitchers.

OK, maybe it was a letter-high strike. But a strike, nonetheless. (It should be noted that if somebody were on base, da Silva's pitch would have been considered a balk, though, based on home plate umpire Ted Barrett's performance in Tuesday's Cubs-Giants game, he might have gotten away with it.)

It was part Tim Lincecum, part Luis Tiant, part Juan Marichal, part Keanu Reeves in "The Matrix," part Kerri Strug at Atlanta.

And did I mention the "KA" guy was dressed like a superhero, with mask and tights and crime-fighting boots?

It was, as Yahoo.com put it, "the coolest first pitch you'll ever see."

This is how you do it, Mariah Carey. This is how you do it, John Wall. This is how you do it, mayor of Cincinnati, who, on Opening Day 2007, delivered the first pitch before the first Reds' game of the season via Toledo and the first-base dugout.

But if outgoing Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman was watching on Channel 4, this is one first pitch he might not want to try at home, much less at Cashman Field the next time he's called upon to perform the duty. He could pull a hammy.

The last time I checked, there were 1,674 comments attached to the video of da Silva's first pitch, which is roughly 1,670 more than you'll find attached to a Padres game story. And that was just on Yahoo.

Gabryel Nogueira da Silva has gone viral, and, unlike Jenn Sterger, he didn't have to embarrass somebody more famous than himself, just Mariah Carey.

"Is this really happening?" da Silva asked when we spoke Tuesday, before he would perform the corkscrew onstage at the KA Theatre -- minus the official Rawlings major league baseball he plans to donate to a children's cancer charity -- much to the delight of tourists from Iowa and a couple of other places.

The folks back in Sao Paulo are never going to believe it, he said.

"You type my name on the Internet, maybe you find one interview," he said, referring to his notoriety before the gravity-defying first pitch.

Now, search engines explode at the mere mention of his name.

Having grown up -- what else? -- a soccer player in Brazil before switching to the martial arts, da Silva, 27, said what little he knew about baseball came from watching it on TV a few times, which sort of makes him like the Padres and the Royals. He had been practicing the corkscrew pitch since February, under the watchful eye of his coach, Paul Cameron, after fellow "KA" artist Pierre-Luc Sylvain suggested he try it at the ballgame. They worked on the pitch in the "KA" training gym and then on a real pitcher's mound, at Rainbow Family Park. The kids on the monkey bars must have thought it was pretty cool.

If Bill Veeck, the innovative baseball franchise owner, were still around -- and the St. Louis Browns were still around -- one can be relatively certain that Gabryel Nogueira da Silva would have signed a major league contract by now and would be warming up in the left-field bullpen, probably throwing to a dwarf.

Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.