SAN DIEGO — It wasn’t hard to pick out Pirates prospect Dovydas Neverauskas in the World team’s clubhouse before Sunday’s annual MLB All-Star Futures Game. As the only Lithuanian player in professional baseball, his is the only jersey with that country’s yellow, green and red flag patched on to the chest. Also, he’s the blond.

Neverauskas, who threw a scoreless inning in the World team’s 11-3 win on Sunday, became the first — and to date, the only — Lithuanian player to sign a contract with a Major League team when he inked a deal with the Pirates as a 16-year-old in 2009. Live arms will travel: Neverauskas can throw fastballs in the mid-90s, and crossed the Atlantic as a teenager despite speaking little English and boasting little experience against advanced competition.

The right-hander spent parts of three seasons pitching in Rookie ball for the Gulf Coast Pirates and saw little success as a Class A starter in 2013 and 2014. But Neverauskas began rocketing through the Pirates’ system after moving to the bullpen last year. Now 23 years old with a 2.39 ERA across Class AA and AAA in 2016, Neverauskas — known as “Never” to his teammates — will need to be added to the club’s 40-man roster by October if the Pirates intend to keep him, making him an obvious candidate to join the big club in September when rosters expand.

“Most of the kids back home, we played baseball in backyards or wherever,” Neverauskas said Sunday, after politely asking a teammate to turn down the Reggaeton throbbing through the World clubhouse. “We had tennis balls and a stick. If I played back home with the neighbors, I would bring a couple of gloves and a bat, a tennis ball or something like that, and we’d play. Everybody there knows what baseball is, but we don’t really understand what baseball here is like, the Major Leagues and that other stuff.”

A Lithuanian-born, American-raised World War I veteran named Steponas Darius introduced baseball to the Eastern European nation after he returned to his homeland in the 1920s. But Darius, whose faced graced the country’s 10 Litas note from 1993 until the currency was replaced by the Euro in 2015, died in 1933 while attempting a nonstop flight from New York to Kaunas, Lithuania. Unsurprisingly, interest in the sport dried up in Lithuania following Darius’ death, with economic hardships and World War II devastating Europe and the Soviet Union frowning on the American pastime after seizing Lithuania in 1944. The Soviet government only helped foster the reintroduction of baseball in Lithuanian some four decades later, after baseball became a Summer Olympic event.

Neverauskas’ father, Virmidas, became part of the first baseball club formed in Lithuania in the 1980s, and made gloves for his teammates out of excess leather from his brother’s shoemaking business. Virmidas Neverauskas now coaches Lithuania’s youth national teams, and developed his son’s interest in the sport. The younger Neverauskas described summers spent playing travel baseball, just like those endeavored by domestic baseball prospects. Except instead of touring Florida or Texas or California, Dovydas Neverauskas played in places like Poland, Italy, Spain and the Czech Republic. He needed to face better competition, he explained, as the baseball landscape in Lithuania remains somewhat barren.

“We didn’t have any fields,” he said. “That’s the biggest problem right now with getting kids to play baseball; we don’t have fields to do it. On the field, when there are rocks and other stuff, it’s not safe. Parents don’t want to put their kids in an unsafe situation.”

Neverauskas caught the eye of Pirates scout’s at MLB’s annual European Elite camp in 2008. Even as a teenager, the decision to sign seemed obvious.

“I was 16, and it was, awesome — the Major Leagues, yeah,” he said. “I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. Starting from Rookie ball, I thought it was going to be so easy to move up. It wasn’t. It took me a long time, some grinds, to get here.”

Neverauskas had traveled the United States with his family for vacations before signing his contract, but living on his own as a teenager in a foreign country presented new challenges. Since MLB hasn’t seen a Lithuanian-born player since Joe Zapustas got five at-bats for the Philadelphia A’s in 1933 (and Zapustas actually grew up in Boston), there’s no real built-in support system for Lithuanians in pro baseball.

“It was very different,” he said of the adjustment to life in the U.S. “I wasn’t really good in English, I didn’t speak a lot, so my English — there was a language barrier…. There’s terms and phrases — “PFPs,” “BP” — I don’t know what that means. Pitchers’ fielding practice, when I got here, you do a lot. Especially in Rookie ball, you do it every day. Comebackers, getting signs, bunt plays, there was a lot of stuff going on that I had never heard of before.”

“The first three years? At 17, 18, 19, being there, I was like, ‘I miss my family and my friends at home.’ But now I’ve kind of gotten used to it; it’s my job, and it’s my dream. I’m trying to accomplish something.”

If and when Neverauskas accomplishes his goal — a Major League career — he hopes his success will lead to better baseball conditions and more interest in the sport in Lithuania.

“I’m just a nobody back home,” he said. “If they see there’s a guy in the Major Leagues, we might have some more kids who want to reach the same goal.”