Film Review: The Kid from Cleveland. (1949). [film] Directed by Herbert Kline.

This is not a baseball movie.

It is instead a moralizing post-war film about juvenile delinquency among the white, urban working-class as told through the story of freckle-faced Johnny, who rebels against his step-father through acts of petty larceny but is saved by a kindly radio broadcaster who provides Johnny the opportunity to experience wholesome male relationships as the batboy of the 1948 World Series champion Cleveland Indians. In the end, Johnny’s delinquency is entirely down to the mother for holding on too dearly to the memory of Johnny’s deceased father (a martyr to the American Way of Life on an unnamed battlefield of the 1940s), which engenders Johnny’s feelings of jealousy and disdain for the interloping step-father. 

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.

Film Review: Pelotero. (2011).

Pelotero (2011). [film] Directed by R. Finkel and T. Martin. USA: Makuhari Media.

The great thing about Pelotero is the immediacy.  The camera seems to be there for many of the most important scenes and gives the film a sense of presence, as if the viewer were there to witness these tangled and frustrating negotiations.  MLB was reportedly not happy with the film.  Then commissioner Bud Selig is said to have called the producers, which included then Boston Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine, to complain about unfair treatment.  Valentine is reported as replying to the effect that the camera simply documented what transpired and if as a result the MLB looks bad, that’s MLB’s fault.

The object of the camera’s focus is a pair of 16-year old Dominican baseball players, pelotero in Spanish, as they perform in tryouts for MLB scouts and prepare to negotiate contracts they hope will launch their families out of poverty.  Dominica has been an attractive source of labor for MLB for the past two decades because, as more than one person remarks in the documentary, it can take advantage of the country’s political and economic weakness to recruit cheap labor. The fly in the MLB’s ointment is the buscone, Dominican coaches who groom talent and act as player agents in contract negotiations, resulting often in million-dollar signing bonuses.

Film Review: Los Pequenos Gigantes. (1960).

Los Pequenos Gigantes. (1960). [film] Directed by H. Butler. Mexico: Classa Films Mundial.

Los Pequenos Gigantes (The Little Giants) tells the story of the 1957 Little League World Series champions, a team from Monterrey, Mexico, the first from outside the United States to take home that trophy.  Filmed in Mexico and the US two years after the events it depicts, the movie is unusual for featuring the children and coach as actors playing themselves.  While poor performances might be expected, in fact the only cringe-worthy turn comes from the team’s American-expat “manager,” who speaks in tin-eared English-accented Spanish. The boys do a fine job representing themselves, as does the coach, the drama’s central character, whose background and motivations unfold slowly and provide a drama within the larger drama.

The film is unusual in a couple of other ways.  The director and co-author of the screenplay, Hugo Butler, was an academy-award nominated screenwriter who served in the US military in World War II before falling victim to America's post-war Communist witch-hunt.  Blacklisted in Hollywood, he moved to Mexico and worked on a number of projects such as this, as well as teaming-up with another expatriate filmmaker, one of the world’s great auteurs, Luis Buñuel. In putting this film together, Butler was able to take liberal advantage of stock footage featuring his actors, such as clips from real games, a meeting at the White House with President Dwight Eisenhower, the homecoming airport reception and parade in Monterey, and a meeting with Mexican President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines.

Butler avoids sentimentality and jingoism and in his presentation of themes of purpose, resolve, resilience, camaraderie, and national pride is deliberately understated. This stands in contrast to the excessively melodramatic English-language Disney remake (The Perfect Game, 2008), featuring a cast of children seemingly wise beyond their years.  For a more sensitive and genuine presentation of this story, seek out Los Pequenos Gigantes.

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Film & Book Review: White Elephant: The Rise and Fall of Miami Baseball Stadium, 2008 & 2013

White Elephant: What is There to Save? (2008). [DVD] Miami, FL: Joe Cardona, producer, director; Rolando Llanes, director; Cantilever Productions, Kids in Exile Films.

Llanes, R. (2013). White Elephant: The Rise and Fall of Miami Baseball Stadium. 1st ed. San Francisco: Blurb.


This is an odd film.  I came to it through an interest in baseball and my own childhood experience of attending Baltimore Orioles spring training games in the 60s and 70s.

But the film is not really about baseball, nor it seems much about the stadium itself.  It is more a collection of historical vignettes loosely connected to the stadium, which opened in 1949 and was demolished in 2001. The absence of an overarching narrative is confounded by nonlinear sequencing, intermittent poetry reading, and an assumption that the viewer is familiar with the mid-20th century history of Miami, Cuba, and Central America.

Film Review: I Will Buy You (1956)

I Will Buy You. (1956). In Eclipse Series 38: Masaki Kobayashi Against the System [DVD].  USA:  Criterion Collection, 2013.

The title alone suggests this is not your typical adulatory sports film.

The protagonist is a youthful talent scout charged with acquiring the services of Japan’s hottest university baseball prospect.  Other teams and scouts are soon in the hunt and the film chronicles their escalating efforts to bribe their way into the hearts and minds of the talent’s suspicious and equally amoral agent, as well as the talent’s impoverished rural family, who literally murder one another over promises of riches.  The talent himself appears to be above the fray, but in the end is revealed equally capable of using others for self enrichment.

The story is suspenseful, written so that the viewer is never sure who might be lying or engaged in a double-cross, and the main characters have a measure of depth that keep them from being mere caricatures. While the protagonist develops a degree of self-awareness, he finds it too little, too late, trapped in the drama he and the rumor-mongering media have created.  The only element that escapes director Kobayashi’s withering criticism is the sports consuming public, whose spending on tickets, newspapers, and merchandise fuels the industry and the corruption on which it depends.

This is not a film that will make you feel happy to be a sports fan, or even a human being.  At times it feels too didactic and too cynical, but from today’s distance it may be difficult to judge.  Perhaps this film cuts close to the Japanese experience in the decade of impoverishment following Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The Dominican talent hunt of the past two decades suggests such behavior is not behind us.

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