Film Review: Sugar. (2008). [film] Directed by A. Boden and R. Fleck.

Sugar. (2008). [film] Directed by A. Boden and R. Fleck. US: HBO Films.

Sugar can sometimes be found in lists of baseball movies, but it is more a story about personal discovery, of learning how to manage life, than it is about baseball.

Anyone wishing to explore the background to Sugar would do well to look into the work of anthropologist Alan Klein, who has published widely on the socio-political-economic aspects of Dominican baseball. With an island-wide network of academies in which young boys are housed and trained for eventual export to the United States, the DR has become a regular and consistent source of inexpensive labor for Major League Baseball.  But for every Sammy Sosa or David Ortiz who signs a multimillion dollar big league contract, thousands of aspirants never make it past the minor leagues.  A touching montage of these now grown men closes out the film, which includes Sugar, our protagonist, a young man whose story highlights the trajectory of many Dominicans brought to the United States to play baseball.

Seen off by family with high expectations of professional and financial success, Sugar arrives in Iowa knowing how to throw a ball but with a number of disadvantages with which to navigate his new environment, including a lack of language skills, the absence of a social support network, and a large, male, black body in a predominately white community.  Finding himself unable to deal with the stress of a slump, he quietly slips away from the team to take a bus to New York to find an old Dominican teammate. There he begins to piece together a new life, finding housing, a job, and then a community, one that includes scores of young Dominicans, discarded baseball labor that make up a weekend league in which baseball is played for fun rather than for profit.

I was not expecting much from Sugar but was pleasantly surprised.  The story seems authentic to what has been reported, the writing and pacing are crisp, and the acting sensitive. If you don't have time for a lot of reading, but have 70 minutes to invest, the 2011 film Pelotero documents the recruitment process and serves as good background viewing to Sugar.

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