Sugar – a Baseball Movie

Sugar(2008) tells the story of a aspiring baseball player from the Dominican Republic. Struggling to make the cut from Dominican semi-professional baseball to the farm leagues of American professional baseball, Miguel (Sugar) learns that the challenge of making the big leagues is more complex and emotional than he had imagined.

Sugar, played by Algenis Perez Soto, is a pitcher with a wicked knuckle-curve ball and impressive physical talent. His potential makes him something of a star in his home town. However, everyone in Sugar’s neighborhood plays baseball. Sugar’s stardom is mitigated also by the fact that his uncle played professionally in the United States.

It is Sugar’s potential to earn a good living that makes him a minor star, not his potential to be “the best”.

Baseball is not a dream, not a path to glamour or glory. Instead, for Sugar and his family, baseball is a way to secure a path out of poverty.

If Sugar can make the big leagues as a pitcher, his younger sister will have the opportunity to stay in school, to become something more than a factory worker like her mother.

With his family’s well-being riding on his shoulders, Sugar heads to Iowa to play in the farm leagues. Successful at first, Sugar seems destined to play in Yankee stadium one day – the Mecca of baseball according to this film.

Trouble begins with disillusionment. Sugar’s friends move on or get cut, leaving the pitcher isolated with his host family on their Iowa homestead. When Sugar falls for the family’s teenaged grand-daughter, the story threatens to become a torrid and sad affair, but pulls away from the storyline as the grand-daughter pulls away from Sugar.

This skirting of story-types is characteristic of the entire film and it is a powerful virtue. Just when Sugar’s story seems predictable, it takes a turn.

The initial success Sugar experiences pitching in Iowa suggests that the film is headed into a montage of images of “moving up”. We can easily see Sugar pitching under the bright lights of Yankee stadium before the film ends.

Yet, things don’t go according to plan.

Sugar doesn’t get the girl. And he doesn’t get in trouble with the family. Instead, he finds himself unnerved by his isolation.

Thousands of miles from his family in the Dominican Republic, Sugar watches his friends leave the Iowa baseball team. People are cut “unfairly” from the team and Sugar worries that he may be next.

With no support network and no sense of security about his team and his future, Sugar does the unexpected.

Part of the charm of this film is that it continually surprises, so we won’t give anything away here. We can say that Sugar summons his aplomb and his resourcefulness and proves himself to be more self-reliant than most people in his position would be.

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Sugar is, perhaps, the most meditative of sports films. A character driven film about pursuing a passion in the face of uncertainty, the sport at the center of the film becomes both setting and subject.

Baseball is what brings Sugar to the United States. Baseball introduces him to the English language, to friends and to mentors.

Baseball is everything for Sugar. The question he faces, in the end, is another surprise given the prominence of baseball in his life. That question is – is baseball enough?

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Resources:
www.IMDB.com