2014 DSL Red Red Sox

It has changed over the last five years I'd say. With the proliferation of organized trainers Leagues like the IPL, DPL among others now generally the good prospects can be more readily seen by scouts. Years ago the kids from the country side and poorer areas were at a disadvantage, this is one of the reasons guys like Hanley, Reyes, Tejada, Vlad signed for low bonuses. It still happens, Oscar Taveras was lightly scouted for that reason, but it happens less. Now the trainers are alerted to the kids making noise in that area so they join the bigger organized leagues before signing.

Yeah, very interesting stuff how the scouting in the DR has evolved over the past 5 years.

Is it about Dominican players phils? The movie "Sugar" is about those players difficult transition to the States, living with a host family in small towns in Iowa i.e, often not knowing our language and culture. It is so realistic that in the special features at the end Pedro and Ortiz and Sosa appear and affirm that it is exactly how it was. Either Roger Ebert or Siskel called it the best baseball movie in 20 years and I quite agree.

You guys are talking about two different movies/documentaries. Sugar is about the life of a real minor league player and the adversities he faced adapting to the life in the US. Ball Player: Pelotero is about the process of signing players with Miguel Sano a main figure in the film, its more of a documentary.

The hidden camera thing is with Rene Gayo, the Pirates International Scouting Director basically trying to black mail Sano and his family into accepting less money. I don't know if people remember before he signed but there were rumors that he was older, which came from Gayo apparently, and he had to take a DNA test to prove his age.

I'd say things have change since the player in "Sugar" went through what he went through. There are more Latin minor league coaches and teams are more aware of this issues so they have a better handle on it. Obviously not everything is perfect but I do think team are making efforts on the issue.

As for Ball Player: Pelotero, I want to believe that not many teams resort to that type of tactic but I'm sure some still do.


Edit: Don't know if you guys had it mixed up just wanted to add to the conversation.

Sorry I thought there was an actual guy the movie was based on. So yes there is a distinction between the two, which was what I originally tried to elaborate on.

Sugar is great, but goes completely off the rails at the end in a way that's even hard to enjoy with a healthy suspension of disbelief.

Great baseball movie for the first, say, 75% (I forget at what point it gets dumb, but those who've seen it probably know exactly what I'm talking about). It goes from being super-grounded in reality to becoming completely unrealistic in pretty much an instant. I get the reasoning from a movie perspective, but it was weird to take such a realistic, interesting movie and give it such a ridiculous ending.

Still, required viewing if you're the type of person who posts here, really.

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As for the team, I'm assuming at this point that Yoan Aybar and Luis Alejandro Basabe are hurt. Neither has played after four games, which is very strange given the bonus the former got and the fact that the latter was the starting 2B in 2013.

The implied ending (in the sense of resolution) was unrealistic, but I thought the last quarter or third act was something that conceivably could happen, and made for a very interesting story. There have been plenty of young minor leaguers who missed a chunk (or even all) of a season due to personal reasons that landed them on the restricted list, and we never really hear the full story behind those.

I made the apparent resolution make sense by imagining that as soon as the credits started to roll, someone from the parent club showed up to start his transition back to playing ball the next year. No way they give up on a talent of his caliber.

The filmakers' previous flick, Half Nelson, BTW, is one of the great all-time indie flicks and (along with Lars and the Real Girl) the definitive proof that Ryan Gosling was as good an actor as any human on the planet, long before he became a hunk / movie star. (Sorry, temporarily possessed by an alternate--and possibly, at present, more devoted--area of geekdom).