(Marc Ri, would you please consider changing the name of this thread? You say you liked 2/3 of SUGAR, but “kind of disappointed” implies you were disappointed in the whole movie or at least the majority of it – and this thread is always highlighted on SUGAR’s home page. Not your fault, but I think it gives people the wrong idea. How about something like “mostly liked, a bit disappointed,” “kinda disappointed in the ending,” or something?)
I didn’t speak directly to the point about whether Miguel went through enough stuff to give him reason to make his decision to leave professional baseball behind.
I APOLOGIZE, THIS IS GOING TO BE LONG.
It’s hard enough for American kids to be rookies – just the pressure of knowing you have to compete with a lot of other talented people to make it, and that there’s a very high chance you won’t. SJR5-1 makes an excellent point about the big fish/little pond and little fish/big pond comparison – it’s hard enough if you’re speaking the same language, of the same race, of the same country. Kids have a hard enough time being the new kid in school. What’s it like being a rookie?
It’s not a familiar physical setting like high school or college. I don’t know how many friendships are developed at that early stage until after the first cuts. It must feel very lonely even in the middle of a lot of other people. Shoeless Jackson went back home after his first day, as an illiterate Southern country boy he wasn’t comfortable in the city among city boys. I don’t remember whether I read it in an article or heard it in a DVD featurette, but Derek Jeter (!) cried every night when he first became a rookie because he had such a hard time adjusting. Today everybody’s so hardened and tough it’s hard to imagine that happening with anybody who grew up in the U.S.
I think Americans underestimate how much of a problem not speaking the majority language is. If we travel, the majority of us expect local people to cater to us and speak English or we’re used to being on tour groups with guides and translators. How many of us really bother to learn a few phrases of Italian? I have in-laws who had a horrible time in Italy because they went on their own, knew no Italian, and couldn’t communicate. They’re not going to go back any time soon – and they’re Italian Americans. I took Spanish in high school and a little in college, I’m nowhere near fluent. It is *so* frustrating not being able to communicate the basics, to be searching my brain for a Spanish word I know that’s close enough to what I want to say.
If I have trouble communicating something as simple as what I want to eat, how can I say how/what I’m feeling/thinking? In interviews, the filmmakers say a lot of Latin American ballplayers like to go to fast food places because they have pictures of the food and they can just point to it – but then they’re asked if they want to super-size it, do they want fries, what size drinks, etc. They pick it up eventually, but it’s another example of what gets in their way, irritants that add up.
If you haven’t been, imagine yourself in a situation where you are the only person of your color in a place in a country completely the opposite of what you’re used to, everybody speaks their language, you don’t speak theirs and they don’t speak yours. Say you’re a 19 year old senior, white guy from Manhattan, then you’re in the steppes of Mongolia where everybody around you are brown and live in tents with no electricity and modern conveniences, and herd horses. You’re expected to pull your own weight and you’re not treated special just because you’re white and American.
That’s the kind of dislocation people immigrating from places like the Dominican Republic, other parts of Latin America and the world, feel – especially if they’re from the country or small villages. Here the climate is different, the houses/neighborhoods are different, people socialize differently. At first, it’s new and interesting, but then you start missing home.
So Miguel leaves his home, his family – his support system of abuela, mama, sister, brother, his girlfriend, Uncle Frank, his village where he was the local hero, the people who run the baseball academy, his country – it’s not an easy thing to do this even for fame, fortune (would it be so easy for you to do without even thinking for a second?) and for his dream, not exactly knowing what it looked like. And with the heavy burden that he wasn’t only doing it for him but for his whole family, his girlfriend, his village. If he failed, it wasn’t just going to be a personal failure. He would have failed all of them. American rookies have barely a wisp of that kind of pressure riding on their shoulders.
Spring training with all the competition was hard work, but at least there were a lot of Dominicans, Venezuelans, and other Latin American ballplayers who spoke Spanish. And maybe things would have turned out differently if Miguel had been assigned to a 1-A team that had a lot of Spanish-speaking players or that was located somewhere where there was a large Spanish-speaking population where Miguel could have found a community – what he had been missing since leaving the D.R. .
Instead he went to the Bridgetown Swing. At first it was great, when he was winning, and his friends Jorge and Brad were there. Then Miguel suffered an injury, which was frustrating. Remember Miguel was only 19, not exactly mature and experienced being on top of his emotions. The brain isn’t even fully developed until 25 years of age. Jorge was cut. Brad was sent up. He wasn’t that close with the Venezuelans. He had lost his stuff, and Salvador had taken his place as the favorite of the team and the fans. He has to adjust from a small crowd of adoring neighborhood fans back home to a stadium full of white people who felt free to insult him and his performance. My husband says pitching, more than any other position, is a very psychological thing. It’s very easy to lose your confidence, and very hard to get it back.
So Miguel was a stranger in a strange land. He left his family and country, he left the majority of Latin American players when he went to Iowa, Once Jorge left and Brad was gone, Miguel had no one he could talk with. He was metaphorically and physically isolated on the farm, not matter how kind and well-meaning the Higginses were. He couldn’t even walk into town.
For Dominican boys, baseball is the dream, but is it a choice? It’s like a mandate – the only way to leave the D.R. and get out of poverty. Gradually, Miguel got exposed to the business side of baseball. He gets signed at 16 for $15,000; Salvador gets signed for $115,000 with his manager getting a 40% cut; Brad gets a $1 million signing bonus. Once a kid is chosen by the baseball academy and quits his high school education, he has nothing to fall back on if he fails in baseball. Miguel realizes the huge chasm between his future and Brad’s when they talk in the locker room. Miguel sees how baseball impersonally treats players like cogs in a machine, if they don’t perform because they don’t have enough talent or are injured – they’re out.
I think for Miguel, all of this together was enough for him to decide to take his future into his own hands, to pro-actively make decisions – not passively wait for the Swing to decide his fate. Maybe another person would have decided to stay. But for Miguel, he was much happier being in a Dominican community, playing baseball for the sheer joy of it, making furniture – another of his passions, making enough money to send back home, and having his freedom.
To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it. - Martin Luther King, Jr.
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