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From \u201cEight Men Out\u201d to \u201cField of Dreams,\u201d baseball movies are usually enraptured by the past. Steeped in traditions, these films celebrate homespun heroes whose anything-is-possible journeys toward a championship elevate our spirits. But two baseball movies from the last 20 years had something else on their minds that would alter how the sport was looked at onscreen. Bennett Miller\u2019s \u201cMoneyball\u201d<\/a> (2011), based on a true story, and Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck\u2019s \u201cSugar\u201d (2008)<\/a>, aren\u2019t about tenacious winners or mythic achievements. Instead, they\u2019re fascinated by failure and community.<\/p>\n That notable shift defies a subgenre built on uplift. A baseball movie will often spin a yarn about a band of misfits coming together for an unlikely title run (\u201cAngels in the Outfield\u201d<\/a>). They can also center once-talented players given one more chance at greatness (\u201cThe Natural\u201d<\/a>), or recall life-changing summers (\u201cThe Sandlot\u201d<\/a>). They tout the majesty, poetry, superstitions and purity of the sport, appealing to truisms lodged in our cultural understanding of fairness: three strikes, you\u2019re out and, as Yogi Berra said, \u201cIt ain\u2019t over till it\u2019s over.\u201d<\/p>\n Following the Oakland A\u2019s general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), \u201cMoneyball\u201d aims to critique an unfair system not by yearning for the past, but by deconstructing the present. Beane is an executive whose small market ball club can no longer compete monetarily with big spenders like the New York Yankees, so he hires the nerdy Yale economics graduate Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) and turns to the teachings of Bill James, a writer who preached sabermetrics as a statistically informed way to maximize talent. Beane and Brand\u2019s unorthodox approach puts them in opposition to the team\u2019s irritable old school manager (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the craggy scouts who rely on their ingrained biases to evaluate players.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n While Beane deconstructs the business of baseball, assembling a stacked roster of discarded players, \u201cMoneyball\u201d the movie also disassembles the subgenre by not really being about baseball. Partway through the film, Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin\u2019s patient screenplay introduces Beane\u2019s young daughter, who hopes the team wins enough for her dad to keep his job. Pitt is wonderful in these scenes, softening Beane\u2019s rigid executive exterior for a kinder, sweeter approach that slowly builds the importance of this father-daughter relationship to the point of Beane turning down a higher paid position with the Boston Red Sox (coincidentally, the A\u2019s are leaving California in 2028 for a lucrative offer to play in Las Vegas).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Seeing Beane\u2019s embrace of fatherhood recalls an imperative moment in Ken Burns\u2019s \u201cBaseball.\u201d<\/a> In that documentary mini-series, Mario Cuomo, the former New York governor, describes baseball as a \u201ccommunity activity,\u201d in which \u201cyou find your own good in the good of the whole.\u201d As much as Beane prizes winning in \u201cMoneyball,\u201d his journey becomes about cherishing family.<\/p>\n Miguel Santos, a.k.a. Sugar, the fast-rising pitcher at the heart of Fleck and Boden\u2019s hardscrabble film, also learns about the power of community. Hailing from San Pedro de Macor\u00eds, the 19-year-old Sugar (Algenis Perez Soto) pitches for the fictional Kansas City Knights baseball academy where he hopes to earn life-changing money for his family in the major leagues.<\/p>\n Like Beane in \u201cMoneyball,\u201d Sugar is working against a broken system. Players like Sugar who aren\u2019t from Canada, the United States or a U.S. territory aren\u2019t eligible for the draft. Instead, they\u2019re acquired through an individual team\u2019s international pool money. This system is meant to give smaller teams like the A\u2019s the ability to compete against bigger franchises for cost-controlled talent, but ultimately limits these athletes\u2019 earning potential. Earlier this year, for instance, the Japanese prospect Roki Sasaki signed with the Dodgers for $6.5 million<\/a>, while last year, the Guardians\u2019 Travis Bazzana, the No. 1 overall pick in the MLB draft, signed for $8.95 million<\/a>.<\/p>\n Most players in the Dominican Republic, however, are like Sugar, who signs for $150,000, only to see a fraction of it after paying his agent. These athletes are often sent at a young age to train at baseball academies to begin their long path to the United States.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n At first, \u201cSugar\u201d is about the exploitation of Latino ballplayers on this journey. After wowing coaches, Sugar is assigned to a single-A team in Iowa. There, he lives with an older white couple who mostly exoticize him, and he falls for a religious white woman intent on proselytizing him. Because Sugar\u2019s English is limited (the academy only taught him baseball words like \u201chome run\u201d), his camaraderie with other athletes of color is imperative. When he loses the community he\u2019s built, leaving him isolated and disillusioned with the American dream, he quits baseball and escapes to New York City in the hopes of again finding solidarity.<\/p>\n Despite their disparate economic backgrounds, the protagonists in \u201cSugar\u201d and \u201cMoneyball\u201d are linked by their setbacks. At 18 years old, Beane, a prized high school prospect, turned down a scholarship to Stanford for a mega baseball contract. Like Sugar, Beane both washes out of baseball and stops dreaming of wealth. \u201cI made one decision in my life based on money, and I swore I\u2019d never do it again,\u201dBeane explains. The two characters instead rekindle their love of the sport by making families. Beane embraces his daughter, whose cover of Lenka\u2019s \u201cJust Enjoy the Show\u201d inspires his growth. Sugar begins playing pick-up games in the park with other Latino former ballplayers.<\/p>\n These two films, with their stories grounded in human struggle, provided a blueprint for other newer sports movies like the basketball-minded \u201cThe Way Back\u201d (2020)<\/a>, Rachel Morrison\u2019s boxing character study \u201cThe Fire Inside\u201d (2024)<\/a> and Carson Lund\u2019s beer league requiem \u201cEephus\u201d<\/a> (in theaters) to approach, with complexity, topics like alcoholism, poverty and aging. \u201cMoneyball\u201d and \u201cSugar\u201d showed that baseball movies could do more than, as James Earl Jones says in \u201cField of Dreams,\u201d \u201cmark the time.\u201d They could look over the fence into the anxieties of the soul.<\/p>\n \u201cMoneyball\u201d<\/em><\/a> and <\/em>\u201cSugar\u201d<\/em><\/a> are available on demand on most major platforms.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n