Sugar

Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's Sugar is great viewing for the early part of the baseball season. Their titular hero works his way from a Dominican Republic baseball camp (which looks startlingly like a minimum security prison complete with armed guards at the gate) owned by the fictional Kansas City Capitals, into the American Minor League system and stalling in Bridgeport, Iowa where most of the film takes place.

The AA affiliate Bridgeport Swing provide housing for their foreign ballplayers in the homes of fans who provide a room and food while attempting to indoctrinate their wards into Midwestern American life.

The film's realistic look at the tribulations of a Dominican baseball player provides ample ammunition for social critique and the camera never strays far from our likable hero. This is a baseball film in the most pure sense as there are no easy victories and the measure of success can not be viewed in the short term but instead when looking at the end result. To paraphrase Ken Burns' documentary Baseball the greatest players are ones who are only successful thirty percent of the time.

Boden and Fleck's followup to Half Nelson, which explored the relationship between a crack addicted teacher and one of his students,continues with that films preoccupation of uncovering the more complicated facts of American life.

IMDB pages:

Sugar
Half Nelson
Baseball