Flashes of Panic

We went out last night to see Sugar, a (fictional) movie about a minor-league pitcher from the Dominican Republic, Miguel “Sugar” Santos, and his adventures in single-A baseball.

The basic plot premise sounds fantastic, and aside from some pacing issues I think it’s done pretty well: Santos, who was signed with the Kansas City “Knights” (all his gear has the “KC” of the Royals) at age sixteen, gets called up to spring training in Arizona at twenty and eventually is assigned to the single-A Swing in “Bridgetown”, Iowa, which seems to be a stand-in for the Quad City River Bandits in Davenport. (They were known as the “Swing” for several years, and the home game scenes are shot at their park.)

So, drop a young, inexperienced and non-English-speaking Dominican into Iowa, playing baseball at the very edge of his ability, and what happens?

Well, things get vague there. The movie is pretty good at spelling out Santos’s difficulties with language and culture (it takes him days to learn to order anything but french toast at a diner in Arizona), but less so at showing his growing disillusionment with baseball. One friendly Iowan asks Santos about a scar on his forehead, and when he stumbles for the words in English, tells him to go ahead in Spanish; his explanation, then, is presented without subtitles, and we get a quick dose of how confusing the English-speaking world is for him, and we can see from the blank expression of the questioner that she isn’t picking up any more than we are.

There’s a vivid contrast with a teammate who was drafted out of Stanford, particularly when the pair discusses what they might do if baseball doesn’t work out for them. Sugar itself is definitely a theme; it’s another Dominican export and comes up in different forms, from rum to syrup, at the oddest times, though I don’t have anything intelligent to say about the symbolism.

It’s not clear if this is a baseball movie and it’s definitely grimmer and tougher than the “making it as a pro athlete” movie from 2005, Goal!. I wonder if a similar scenario, given a full-on Hollywood treatment, would have been a more gripping story, or too sweet.