Japan nearly came to a standstill as millions watched on TV while Hideki Matsui, the man they know as Godzilla, stomped around New York to lead the Yankees to the World Series title.
Matsui became the first Japanese-born player to win the MVP trophy for the Most Valuable Player of the World Series with a record-tying six RBIs in the clincher to lead the Yankees over the Philadelphia Phillies 7-3 on Wednesday.
Matsui homered, doubled and singled in Game 6, highlighting a Series in which he hit .615 with three home runs and eight RBIs.
Japanese workers crammed into downtown electronics stores to watch the final few innings on giant TVs. The game ended just before 2 p.m. local time Thursday, giving workers an excuse to take an extended lunch break.
"All the news recently has been about Ichiro Suzuki," said office worker Hiroyuki Takeuchi, who took the morning off to watch the game. "But Matsui's presence is huge. He overcame injuries and came through with the performance of a lifetime. As a Japanese, I'm very proud today."
Matsui was a three-time MVP for the Yomiuri Giants in the regular season in 1996, 2000 and 2002, his last year in Japan. He also won the MVP award in the 2000 Japan Series, Japan's version of the World Series.
Earning the nickname "Godzilla," Matsui hit 50 home runs in 2002. The No. 55 on his uniform is a tribute to Sadaharu Oh's single-season home run record.
"As the first Japanese to win an MVP in the World Series, this is a great accomplishment for Matsui and will have a huge impact," said former San Francisco Giants pitcher Masanori Murakami, the first Japanese player to play in the major leagues, who watched at his Tokyo home.
Matsui always has been popular in Japan, but his decision not to play in the World Baseball Classic drew criticism from some fans. Matsui always said he was passing over the WBC to prepare for the season with the Yankees.
The 35-year-old designated hitter is in the final year of a $52 million, four-year contract. And every baseball fan across Japan wants to know this: What will the Yankees do with Matsui?
"He's a very hard worker and is serious about his career," Murakami said. "I hope he stays with the Yankees. I know he wants to stay, and the Japanese fans want him to stay."
Japanese sports dailies have speculated about his future, some even saying he might return to Japan to play for the Hanshin Tigers, the fierce Central League rivals of the Giants.
"I hope he stays in New York," Takeuchi said. "He looks good in pinstripes."
Some guys like to sneak up on their target.
Joe Girardi put his on the back of a uniform:
No. 27.
And no sooner had Girardi delivered a 27th World Series title for the most storied franchise in American pro sports than he began plotting for the next one. No surprise there. The man always has a plan.
"We'll see," he said, "if anyone is going to charge me for No. 28."
It's yours, Joe. No one on the Yankees wore the number in the World Series, and by the time the next one rolls around, no one else would dare. Come to think of it, just about everything else in town will be yours for the asking, too.
It doesn't hurt, of course, that Girardi was a hero in New York long before he parked his backside in the manager's chair two years ago. That was because of the three World Series rings he won wearing pinstripes and the time he spent learning the trade as a bench coach under Joe Torre.
But this one was different. Girardi couldn't hand off the credit fast enough.
"As a player, it's what you dream about ever since you were a little boy. As a manager you still have that joy, but the joy is for other people ... and the behind-the-scenes work that it takes. It starts with the Boss and his family and Brian Cashman," Girardi said, crediting the Steinbrenners and his general manager first, then naming just about everyone on the organizational chart.
Girardi is smart that way, but genuine, too. As much as he's a stickler about getting things exactly right, the one thing he never forgets is that baseball is still a game played by people.
"Joe pushed all the right buttons," Yankee captain Derek Jeter said. "He was great to play for. Right from day one, we thought we had a special group and he was leading us."
It's no coincidence that catchers like Girardi, who wind up orchestrating the game on the field, make the best managers. Or that Philadelphia's Charlie Manuel was the only one of the four managers whose teams reached the league championship series who didn't play the position. Like Girardi, the Dodgers' Torre and the Angels' Mike Scioscia are former backstops as well.
None, however, was shaped by the experience more than Girardi.
He was ripped for micromanaging his bullpen throughout the postseason and called too smart for his own good. Critics said Girardi ran the game like an engineer and cited his bachelor's degree in industrial engineering from Northwestern as though it made a slam-dunk case. Much, too, was made about the binder of statistics stuffed with scouting reports and statistical matchups that sat on the bench never more than an arm's reach away.
Yet the one decision that drew the most fire -- letting backup Jose Molina catch starting pitcher A.J. Burnett instead of front-liner Jorge Posada -- was strictly a seat-of-the-pants move. And it might have saved the Series. Girardi stuck with his decision after losing Game 1 at home and was rewarded when Molina, a better defender than Posada, called a nearly flawless game behind the plate and made a pickoff throw to first that was a pivotal play in Game 2.
What few people remembered is that Girardi was in a similar position in 1999. He was the Yankees' No. 1 catcher at the time, but it was already clear to everyone else in the organization that Posada was the future. Despite the loyalty that was forged between Girardi and Torre, Posada got the start for Game 4 of the World Series over Girardi. It was a lesson in team-building he never forgot.
In a sense, that day prepared him for this one. Girardi learned the best thing he could do as a manager was put his charges in a position to succeed. He put that lesson to work in his first managing job, a one-year stint with the lowly Marlins, pushing an unproven collection of youngsters into the 2006 NL wild-card race, despite the lowest payroll in the game. For his effort, though, he got fired immediately afterward, despite being named NL manager of the year.
When Girardi picked up his walking papers, all Girardi said, wisely, was thanks for the opportunity. He got mentioned for nearly every job that opened up in the interim, making the short list with the Cubs, Orioles, Nationals and even the Yankees, when Torre nearly got fired in 2007. But by then, Girardi had already hatched a more ambitious plan.
"I really believe in this club," he said. "I've always believed in this organization."
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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at) ap.org
Trust the Wall Street Journal for the really important number crunching.
Since 1930, the Yankees -- who would clinch their 27th World Series trophy with a win tonight -- have been a harbinger of average 5 percent GDP growth in years following a series victory.
Meanwhile, as documented by Gary Weckselblatt of the Bucks County Courier Times, when a team from Philadelphia wins the Series, we all suffer horribly.
Last year needs no embellishment. In 1980, writes Weckselblatt, "interest rates were above 20 percent, and unemployment remained at high levels (about 7.5 percent) through the end of 1981."
But the last time Philadelphia won two straight World Series? The A's, in 1929-1930. And we all remember what happened then.
Say what you will about small sample sizes and correlation-is-not-causation, but based on this analysis, it's hard to argue with the data: the unlikely event of a Philadelphia victory would all but ensure a vicious double-dip recession. For the sake of the children, we should be rooting for the Yankees to close this thing out, preferably tonight.
And yet, much as I care about the welfare of my country, I find I hate the Yankees even more. Remember: GDP growth does not necessarily translate into happiness, and the pall of gloom that would descend over the national psyche should the Yankees win again might be more devastating in its long-term psychological impact than even a second Great Depression. Right?
It's not easy for a Republican to win a statewide race in Massachusetts, especially not when the race is to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. Just about the only way to make it easier for the GOP would be for them to run, say, a former star pitcher for the Boston Red Sox who helped the team to its first championship in almost 90 years.
And so it is that rumors are flying that Curt Schilling will make a run, as a Republican, in the special election being held early next year to replace Kennedy. He says he has been contacted about the idea, but has been sending mixed signals about it; asked during a television interview on Wednesday whether he would run, he replied, "As of today, probably not." But then, on his blog, he said, "I do have some interest in the possibility."
There's one big problem, though: According to Politico's Josh Kraushaar, Schilling couldn't run as a Republican. That's because he's currently registered as an independent, and anyone who wants to run with a given party has to be a registered voter with that party as of 90 days before the filing deadline. Schilling doesn't have enough time to get past that hurdle, so he'd have to run as an independent.
It wasn’t long after the Los Angeles Dodgers announced their new radio broadcasts for women that the Internet erupted in jeers: "We're really glad the Dodgers understand that, as women, we feel uncomfortable learning anything that's not coming from a Mom's perspective," wrote Sadie Stein at Jezebel, while Deadspin positioned the broadcast as, “Some Chick To Teach Other Broads About Man Things.”
When I heard about the broadcasts, my leg practically broke from the knee-jerk. As a woman who has played sports, followed sports, and written about sports, the idea of being pulled aside and having the game “explained” to me and everyone else who doesn't have a Y chromosome isn’t just insulting -- it makes me wonder if the Dodgers’ front office is legally blind. Did they somehow miss the fact that more than 40 percent of the MLB fan base is female? It sounded like another boneheaded attempt at target marketing. You know, if you build it -- and paint it pink -- they will come.
For female fans, there are few things more painful than watching marketing pros smother sports with pastel. It’s bad enough that women running, say, a marathon have to wade through racks of pink tops and cringe-inducing jogging “skirts.” When we want to buy our favorite team’s jersey, we’re forced to weed through the same cotton candy jungle. Pretty soon, they’ll be selling us Dodger blue tampons with glitter wrappers.
But before you completely upchuck in your Cracker Jacks, it is worth considering this: Attendance to major league games is down as much as 4.5 percent from this time last year, thanks primarily to the recession. The Dodgers alone are already averaging almost 2,000 fewer attendees per game than last season, and while MLB teams haven’t been hit as hard as feared, they’re not exactly unbruised.
Under such circumstances, why not market to women? For one, women are more likely to purchase team apparel, and are increasingly identifying themselves as fans. The Boston Globe reported that the percentage of women who call themselves Red Sox fans rose from 45 percent in 2001 to 77 percent in 2006. Sure, a World Series victory jump-started the ride, but when that bandwagon rolled into town, women quickly jumped on board -- and spent. The Cleveland Indians have an entirely separate store for “female” merchandise and apparel at Progressive Field (talk about irony) called “Tribe Pride for Her.” Not only do they sell the regular cap and T-shirt swag, but also $325 pocketbooks.
“Our CEO has a saying that behind every great man is a great woman, and behind every great woman is a checkbook,” jokes Dr. Charles Steinberg, the club’s executive VP of marketing and public relations -- although I’m not sure if he’s laughing with me or at me. His reasoning, however, is not invalid. Marketing research from the Dodgers’ camp and beyond shows that women more often control household finances than men.
Enter the Dodgers’ Women’s Initiative Network (WIN). Under the direction of CEO Jamie McCourt, who to her credit is the highest-ranking woman in baseball, the club launched its inaugural WIN radio broadcast on May 20 to an audience of about 400 (450 people later listened to the archived broadcast on the Web). Jeanne Zelasko, a former studio host of FOX’s national baseball coverage, gave the play-by-play, while ex-Dodger Mark Sweeney handled analysis. The next broadcast is tonight, June 3, when the Dodgers face the Arizona Diamondbacks.
I tuned in to listen to the debut, and I have to say, the broadcast wasn’t terrible. Zelasko delivered with relative ease, and Sweeney managed to stay away from “Hush, honey,” territory. For most of the game, I sat with my ears perked, waiting for the condescending explanation of the infield fly rule or a double switch -- but to no avail. It was, if a bit unremarkable, at least competent.
On the other hand, Zelasko offered few feminist perspectives -- which seemed to be the whole point in the first place. One of the only moments that jumped out was when she mentioned it was Casey Blake bobblehead day at the park and said, “You know how if you’re a parent and you have more than one kid, you have to bring something home for everybody?” But that statement was more of a throwaway than anything else, and didn’t change the experience of the game for me as much as it interrupted it.
The rest of the broadcast consisted of Zelasko simply talking about what was happening on the field, promoting WIN and asking Sweeney about his days in the dugout -- the latter of which could be effective in gaining women's attention, according to Marti Barletta, president and CEO of Trendsight and Marketing to Women. While men tend to be more stats-driven, women relate more to players’ back stories. In this capacity, Zelasko could serve as a connection for women lost in other broadcasts’ analytics. But most women, especially the Dodgers' faithful, who grew up listening to Vin Scully (who with 60 years experience, tells stories better than the Brothers Grimm), likely won’t be impressed.
“Even if there was no difference between Jeanne’s play-by-play and a man’s play-by-play, at least you’ve helped break the barriers,” says Steinberg, who, frankly, has a point. The vast majority of female broadcasters are quarantined to the sidelines, forced to ask sometimes silly questions of sweaty players that require relatively little knowledge of the actual game. But really breaking barriers would require letting Zelasko -- who reportedly wasn’t invited to audition for the more prominent TV play-by-play spot -- broadcast for an audience not ordained “female.” (The only comparable woman is the Yankees’ Suzyn Waldman, who unfortunately is best known for crying on air. Her role in broadcasts is color commentator.)
To be fair, the Dodgers are, far more than any other club, progressive not just in the hiring of women but the positions for which those women are hired. Besides McCourt, they also have assistant general manager Kim Ng, Major League Baseball’s highest ranking woman in baseball operations. And the initiatives aren’t exactly failing. The Dodgers expect Zelasko’s audience to grow with each broadcast (the debut wasn’t heavily promoted), and there have been lines outside the WIN tent since mid-May. I can burn my bras (or baseball caps) all I want, but the truth is: A lot of this stuff works.
“Every time you see a women’s marketing program that has fashion or spas in it, it’s very tempting to say, ‘Women are about a lot more than that,’” says Barletta. “But it’s true that a lot of women do like those things, and a lot more than men do.”
But what about the pink caps? The pricey pocketbooks? The bedazzled denim jackets sold at team shops?
“Things can be pink,” says Barletta. “But you also need to have red, and blue, and black and white options. If you just say, ‘Here’s a pink phone for women, or a pink shirt for women,’ women will shoot you in the face.”
While major league teams like the Phillies and Braves are targeting women with Baseball 101 programs designed to teach women basic instruction and provide them face time with players, the Dodgers, who also have a clinic at their spring training site, are taking a slightly different approach this season. For McCourt and company, they're luring in the women by lining up celebrities. This is L.A., after all.
On June 1, fans gathered outside the WIN tent before the game to meet not Matt Kemp or Orlando Hudson, but the cast of "The Young and the Restless." Don't worry if you missed it: The cast of "Days of our Lives" will be on hand for autograph signings before the game on June 6.
The stunt is enough to make many a female fan throw her foam finger in the air -- but clearly not everyone is peeved. “The events started with just 1,500 or so people signing up, and instantly tripled to 4,500 in just the first five days we had the Dodgers WIN tent,” says Steinberg.
“Whether or not women appreciate being targeted depends on how it’s done,” says Barletta. “I don’t think [WIN] is sexist, but I think it’s poorly executed.”
So what can you do? As someone who finds nothing more thrilling than watching a runner slide into home or a ball soaring over the outfield, it breaks my heart to think of women flocking to the fields, Sharpies in hand, to get headshots -- not baseballs -- signed. Trot in all the celebrities you want, but I will never waver in my belief that there are really only two things worth standing in line for at a game: a beer and a hot dog.
You can read Selena Roberts' "A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez" in less than four hours, and it reads as if it took about that long to write it. The book is a dud, and much of this can be written off to Alex Rodriguez himself. Despite all the tattle about his sybaritic private life -- he goes to illegal gambling clubs and hangs out with strippers, just as Babe Ruth did 80 years ago -- Rodriguez doesn't seem to have much of a private life. Even the handful of details about his relationship with Madonna mostly involve how serious he is about the Kabbala -- not exactly what checkout line readers want to know.
The press jumped on last week's leaks from the book alleging that, among other things, Rodriguez is supposed to have used steroids as a teenager; the source for that -- the only source -- is Jose Canseco, who says, "I think probably so." (The Dodgers' Doug Mientkiewicz, who knew Rodriguez all through high school, told the Los Angeles Times that the story is nonsense and that "It would be 99.9% impossible for us not to know." )
One serious accusation in the book is that, from his position as shortstop, he "tipped" opposing hitters to the kind of pitch his pitchers were about to throw in return for similar favors when he was at bat. Roberts quotes a couple of players who claim this happened; others, whom Roberts didn't talk to, have recently come out and said that this is ridiculous.
What else was leaked? Oh, yes, the story that Rodriguez was such a prima donna when he was with the Texas Rangers that he made the clubhouse guy put the toothpaste on his toothbrush. Whether he used artificial whiteners to give his smile an unfair advantage isn't mentioned.
How interesting you find numerous other tidbits depends on how much you really want to know about Alex Rodriguez. I could have done without knowing he "can't stand fat people. He really can't be around them." I was mildly amused to find he "liked shopping for Frank Sinatra tunes. He was old school," and that "His wife always ordered for him when they had breakfast." That's at least two things I have in common with baseball's highest-paid player.
Beyond that, "A-Rod" is pretty much a collection of just about every bad story, rumor or innuendo ever told about Alex Rodriguez. Samples: He "snubbed children he had agreed to greet at a Dominican baseball celebration outside Yankee Stadium in 2008." (Apparently his entourage was so big that the kids couldn't get within 20 feet of him.) He "purchased overpriced art from SoHo galleries." Which artists? What prices? At the least we should be informed so we don't make the same mistake.
At least a few of Roberts' sources have gone on record, including a former teammate, Chad Curtis, who said, "I think we should all recognize that things like that [i.e., A-Rod's enormous talent and wealth] can stir up within us jealousy." Most of her sources, though, are anonymous, making it difficult to gauge how much personal animosity colored their statements. Roberts did not speak with Mientkiewicz, who told the L.A. Times, "If you're going to have the guts to come out and say something like that, of that magnitude ... be a man and put your name on it."
Roberts, a former New York Times columnist, is the Sports Illustrated reporter who broke the story that Rodriguez had tested positive for Primobolan and testosterone while he was with the Texas Rangers; he subsequently admitted that he had used the substances all three years he was at Texas, from 2001 through 2003. In terms of criminality, this is petty stuff; at the time, Major League Baseball had attached no penalties to the use of either drug, a point that the media (which has been roasting Rodriguez on a regular basis for years) hasn't yet realized. The rest of the book seems to be an attempt to build a case that Rodriguez has done something much worse than that, but as in the old Bob Dylan song, nothing is revealed. Almost all of the book's major assertions are unsubstantiated.
Two players supposedly close to A-Rod (they are unnamed, sigh!) claim, "He has used HGH [human growth hormones] while with the Yankees based on the side effects they've seen." Put aside the fact that human growth hormones are not the same as steroids; what exactly are the side effects of HGH? (Roberts never tells us.) And how would these two players be qualified to identify them? The reader is offered no clue.
Roberts seems to know little about the drugs she writes about. As Baseball Prospectus' Will Carroll has tirelessly reminded us, a vast number of substances come under the vague category of "performance enhancing drugs" and only a few are actual steroids. Roberts lumps them all together and makes two general assumptions: first, that all such drugs are bad, a point on which sports physicians are by no means in agreement, and second, that all PEDs actually enhance performance.
Regarding nearly all of them, including the Primobolan and testosterone that Rodriguez admitted to taking, it can be stated that there isn't evidence that they improve baseball performance at all. The Texas Rangers' batting statistics while Rodriguez was on the team were indeed impressive: "The Rangers became an offensive juggernaut, putting up astonishing power numbers. The question wasn't 'What's in the water in Texas?' but 'What's in the bag?'" Roberts doesn't seem to know that the real question is "What's in the ballpark?" The ballpark in Arlington, where the Rangers play, is known by baseball analysts to be one of the best hitter's parks in baseball. Everyone's statistics are inflated there, and Rodriguez's home run totals in all other big league parks while playing for Texas were virtually the same as his road statistics when playing for the Seattle Mariners and New York Yankees. If the drugs increased his power while hitting at Arlington, one wants to know why they had no effect everywhere else.
If Roberts has no insight into PEDs, her understanding of the role and function of the Major League Baseball Players Association is positively nonexistent. Players Association legal counsel Gene Orza is described as "an almost maniacal civil libertarian who defended players even when they seemed indefensible." Does Roberts not understand that it's the right of any union member to due process? Union bashing runs rampant in "A-Rod." Despite the absence of a comprehensive study of so-called PEDs and what their effects are, the union has constantly been ripped in the press for not allowing a random drug testing program to be imposed on them. What union would?
Most irresponsible of all, Roberts accuses the union of warning the players that their drug tests were coming up, an old charge that stems back to the 2007 Mitchell Report on drug use in baseball. If Roberts had bothered to check the basic agreement between the owners and players, she would have found that there was no provision for letting the union know when drug tests were scheduled -- that's pretty much the definition of "random" testing -- and therefore no way the union could have "tipped" players. (As Orza calmly explained to the press when the tipping charge was first made, the union did contact players periodically to remind them that they had not yet been tested.) In any event, the idea that the union could avoid a positive test by alerting a player to an upcoming drug test is silly. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of steroids or other PEDs knows that it can take more than a few of weeks for the traces to wash out of one's system.
Roberts never mentions the fact that the tests revealing Rodriguez's drug use were agreed to by the union and Major League Baseball to determine whether a drug policy should be instituted. The tests were to be anonymous, both sides agreed, and if more than 5 percent of the players tested positive, then random drug testing would be implemented throughout MLB. For reasons too complicated to go into here, the samples weren't destroyed and were seized by federal agents as part of their ongoing investigation into the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (or BALCO, the steroids manufacturer connected to the Barry Bonds scandal). Whether the feds had a right to take the samples -- most legal experts say no -- is an issue that is still being fought in court. At any rate, agents deciphered the identity code for the samples and put a name to each, then revealed the identities of the 104 players who tested positive to both the commissioner's office and the players union.
So how exactly did Roberts find out about A-Rod's test result? And, equally important, why was this the only name of the 104 to be revealed? Certainly neither MLB nor the union had any reason to divulge information that they had initially agreed to keep secret. It's pretty certain that the only way Roberts could have found out about A-Rod's test results was from the feds, who are still in possession of the test samples. Why would the feds leak the information? Perhaps to have something to show for years of effort and millions of dollars spent.
And, why A-Rod and only A-Rod? That much, at least, is obvious: He's the highest-paid player in baseball history, the one most likely to set the all-time home run record and, so far at least, the only active player known to have studied the Kabbala with Madonna. Roberts seems completely unconcerned that her outing of A-Rod may be a blatant violation of his civil liberties, though the issue of right and wrong here would seem to be at least as clear as most of the ones the Times and their papers have rightly flogged the Bush administration for.
Compiling a list of great baseball movies is a little like figuring out which of the dentists you've ever visited was the most fun: an uncomfortable task, best shirked or postponed. But with spring flowers busting out all over and Major League Baseball's opening day just around the corner comes the release of "Sugar," a moving, surprising and provocative baseball flick that rises immediately to No. 1 with a bullet on my personal list. (After that comes "Eight Men Out" and "Bull Durham," and then, hmm, I guess a few scenes from "The Natural" and "A League of Their Own." And I refuse to go any deeper into the bullpen than that.)
"Sugar" is the long-awaited new film from the writing-directing team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, best known for the 2006 indie hit "Half Nelson," with its memorable performance by Ryan Gosling as a well-intentioned New York schoolteacher with an itsy-bitsy crack cocaine problem. While "Sugar" has none of the overtly Marxian or Brechtian elements found in "Half Nelson," you'd be right in suspecting that it avoids both the sentimentality and the zaniness that pretty much define the unfortunate baseball-movie genre.
There's clearly a social and political subtext and context to "Sugar," especially as it captures the strange world of the Dominican Republic's "baseball academies," where that nation's raw talent is nurtured for North American harvest in a sort of plantation system controlled by Major League Baseball teams. But if this is a story about how a beloved American game has become a peculiar quasi-colonial enterprise, it's also a story of one young man's maturation and transformation. Miguel "Sugar" Santos (played by the charismatic Algenis Pérez Soto, plucked by Boden and Fleck from the more than 500 Dominican kids they auditioned) is a teenage pitcher being groomed for stardom. During the course of the story he moves from the Dominican to spring training in Arizona, minor-league stardom in an utterly alien realm of Iowa and onward toward an ambiguous destiny.
Are there any other baseball movies that work equally well for hardcore fans and for those totally uninterested in the game? Boden and Fleck like and understand baseball, and their game scenes are far more realistic than those you generally see on film. But "Sugar" isn't fundamentally a story about winning or losing in baseball. It's about one young man's struggle to become an individual, to become something more than just another dark-skinned, Spanish-speaking "talent," raw material from an impoverished sugar-cane island. I suppose some baseball fans may feel that their beloved sport is under attack here, but that would be missing the point of the film almost completely. (I may as well confess my hopeless bias here: Fleck and I grew up in the same Bay Area city, some years apart, and like me he's a longtime follower of the Oakland A's. With all due respect to Cubs, Indians and pre-2004 Bosox fans, you don't get more O.G. than that.)
"Sugar" has no name actors whatsoever -- although Pérez, himself a former ballplayer with soulful eyes and a brilliant smile, could be a movie star in waiting -- and perhaps two-thirds of the dialogue is in Spanish. (There's a bizarre synchronicity going on with "Sugar" and Cary Fukunaga's "Sin Nombre," two movies made in Spanish, without movie stars, by directors from Berkeley, Calif.) It's also a straightforward, traditionally constructed character drama shot in bright colors, following Miguel's career trajectory forward from the moment he masters the "knuckle curve," an almost unhittable pitch that renders him, at least temporarily, a hot property in the Kansas City Knights' farm system. (Other big-league teams are referred to by their real names; the Knights are of course fictional.)
At first, Sugar is just one of the guys at the Knights' academy in Boca Chica, where young prospects live in dorm barracks under a 10 p.m. curfew, spending every waking moment playing baseball, working out or consuming enormous quantities of cafeteria food. (Oh, there's also English class: "I got it!" "Ground ball!" "Line drive!" "Home run!" And then a chorus of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame.") But when a visiting American instructor shows him the knuckle curve -- one of the most dazzling and difficult pitches in a hurler's arsenal -- Miguel begins to look like a hot property.
Along with showing us a world even most baseball fans know nothing about, Boden and Fleck capture Miguel's prodigious loneliness as he travels to the Knights' spring-training camp in Phoenix, where older Latino players show him the most important aspects of American life: no pay-per-view porn in the hotel room, no drinking beer from the minibar. It takes him numerous visits to Denny's before he can summon up enough English to order something besides "Fren' toast." (This is actually the one area of "Sugar" where I felt unsure about veracity. Isn't the waitress in an Arizona 24-hour diner, even if she's 100 percent Anglo, likely to have picked up a smattering of bad Spanish?)
When Miguel is assigned to the Knights' class-A franchise in Bridgetown, Iowa, he lives on a farm outside of town with an older couple whose principal passions in life are the Presbyterian Church and the Bridgetown Swing, Sugar's new team. He pines for the Higginses' wholesome Christian-teen granddaughter, who likes him back just fine, but the distance between them is more than a matter of race or language or religion.
There are moments when "Sugar" feels almost like a spiritual story, a story about a man uprooted from home and family who must face crippling solitude as a test of character. Boden and Fleck's most evocative scenes are wordless, or nearly so: Miguel staring out the window into the Higgins family farmyard, or sitting alone, nursing a beer or a soda, on the fringe of a group of teammates amid the noise and flashing lights of an amusement-park arcade.
Pérez has to carry an immense amount of this movie on his muscular shoulders, and must convey to us with very few words and almost no overt emotional display that Miguel is searching for something that baseball can't give him. For a few weeks Miguel is the star of Bridgetown's starting rotation, but after he injures his foot and has trouble reestablishing control of his pitches, his archetypal Dominican dream of pitching in Yankee Stadium and lifting his entire extended family out of poverty begins tangibly to slip away.
Miguel's story takes some unexpected shifts in the last third of the film, but "Sugar" never tries to psychoanalyze its protagonist, and never inserts a helpful voice-over or an English-speaking mentor or girlfriend to explain everything to us. Miguel's journey, and his ultimate destination, just have a lovely coherence. If the hero of this tender and lovingly constructed film is a dignified young man who holds himself at a distance from us, we'll respect him all the more for it in the morning.
It's obvious why Sony Pictures Classics has waited until this spring to release "Sugar," which actually premiered at Sundance way back in January 2008. At the time, I sat down with Fleck and Boden in Park City, Utah, for a brief conversation about the A's chances (abysmal last year; microscopically better this year) and their journey with Sugar Santos from the Dominican to Arizona, rural Iowa and to a surprising conclusion in New York.
You're probably getting this a lot, but I've had several e-mails from readers who've been, like, "Those guys from 'Half Nelson' made a baseball movie? Really?" And I would have to say, yes, it really is a baseball movie.
Ryan Fleck: Yeah, it's both. It's a baseball movie, sure, because there's a lot of baseball in it. But we studied all the baseball films in preparation for this, and there are not a lot of good ones.
It's a pretty tough category, yeah.
R.F.: It's hard to sell the reality of what goes on in a game, and if it's OK to pat ourselves on the back, I feel like we did a pretty good job. We were really committed to making the baseball scenes look real and feel real, while also focusing on the human side of the game.
It sounds as if you had an amazing experience in the Dominican. You auditioned, what was it? Several hundred young guys before you found Algenis, who is so amazing?
R.F.: Yeah, it was over 500 guys, close to 600. The two of us went down there and spent a few months in the Dominican Republic. We'd just roll up on a baseball field -- and they're everywhere -- and set up a tripod and interview kids. If any of them showed any kind of spark, some kind of charisma or something, then we'd give them sides, scenes from the movie, and invite them back the next day.
It was funny, it was really telling. They would come in the next day and read everything on the page: the description and then the character name and then the line. Because of course they'd never seen a script before, and we'd have to explain: No, that's the name of your character. Just read the part under that. That was an eye-opening experience for us.
Now, based on "Half Nelson," some people may be expecting a strong social and political text to this film, like a critique or an exposé. Without giving too much away, to what degree is this that kind of film?
Anna Boden: I think the social context of any story is really important to Ryan and me. We all live in the world, and it's important to make movies that show people interacting with the world. There isn't a lot of really overt political discussion or dialogue in the film, but I do think the foundation of the movie is about the social context of this young man learning that he's part of this system. Even though the kind of political awakening that he has is not something the movie articulates in words for you, I think that emotionally it's an important moment for him. Part of the story of the movie is about him trying to take control of a life in which he's been part of this machinery.
Well, even most baseball fans have never seen the Dominican system in operation, and as you depict it, it's this weird and startling pseudo-colonial thing, where the conditions inside the training facilities are completely different from the poverty that surrounds them. Doesn't every big-league team, or almost every team, have a facility down there?
A.B.: Every single one. Some of them are very advanced and have 70 players training, and some of them are just starting and share a field with another team and may have six players. But they're all growing, and everybody has a presence down there.
R.F.: One of the things that drew us to this story was this really staggering statistic. If you look at the '80s, the percentage of African-American players in baseball was around 22 percent. That has gone down to somewhere around 8 or 9 percent now, while the Dominican population in baseball has risen dramatically.
[Note: This is roughly correct. In 1975, African-American players filled 27 percent of roster spots in Major League Baseball, an all-time high. That number has declined ever since, and now stands around 8 percent. Meanwhile, the Dominican Republic, with a total population of 9.5 million people, supplied about 11 percent of big-league players in 2008.]
Major League Baseball has taken money out of the inner cities, partly because baseball is an expensive sport to play. It's not like basketball, where all you need is a ball and a hoop. You need lots of equipment, and you've got fields you have to take care of. They've taken money out of the cities and flipped it into the Dominican Republic, where they can sign players much cheaper.
Again, we don't want to give too much away, but let's just say that Miguel visits New York, late in the film, and finds himself in the middle of the city's enormous Dominican immigrant community. That's another world most of us haven't seen, even if we live there, as you guys do.
A.B.: New York City has the second-highest Dominican-born population of any city in the world. Outside of Santo Domingo, even the second largest city in the Dominican Republic does not have as many Dominicans as New York. It's a huge part of New York culture, and we got to learn about communities in Washington Heights [in upper Manhattan] and the Bronx, as well as communities in the Dominican Republic. One of the most fun things about making a movie, for us, is getting to learn and explore new cultures and new people.
Well, you also shot part of this movie in rural Iowa -- that probably counted as a new culture, for you guys!
R.F.: That counts, totally! Our whole crew went on Miguel's journey. We were fish out of water in the Dominican Republic, working in a place with a very different culture, where we didn't speak the language. And then, even though they speak English in Iowa -- and everyone is so friendly -- it's a very, very different place to work than New York City. The whole experience was really eye-opening for us.
"Sugar" opens April 3 in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.
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