After almost passing on role, failed baseball prospect shines in Sugar

Sugar is rated R and opens in New York and Los Angeles April 3. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics Sweet And Lowdown Sugar delivers goods on neglected cinematic topic Despite a slew of baseball movies in the past two decades, the Latino experience in the game has gone largely unexamined. Hispanic characters such as Pedro Cerrano, the Jobu-worshipping slugger in Major League, are usually there purely for comic relief. That all changes with Sugar, a film that poignantly explores the loneliness, cultural disconnection and cut-throat competition experienced by a Latino prospect thrown into the cornfields of Iowa on his first minor league stop. Apart from its masterly storytelling, the film's greatest strength is its authenticity, much of which comes from Algenis Perez Soto. He plays Miguel "Sugar" Santos, a Dominican pitcher who, armed with a biting knuckle curve, is trying to pull his family out of poverty. The 25-year-old Perez Soto was a shortstop in San Pedro de Macors. He gave up his big league ambition but continued to play pickup baseball and softball, which is how filmmakers spotted him and asked him to audition. "The only camera I had in front of me before was just to take a picture," says Perez Soto. Despite his lack of acting experience, he delivers a soulful performance. In one scene Miguel asks a teammate who is a multimillion-dollar bonus baby fresh out of Stanford what he would do if his baseball career were cut short. The teammate says he would probably go to grad school. Perez Soto pensively gazes at the floor and says nothing, which says everything: Baseball is Miguel's only option. Perez Soto recalls screening the movie in Santo Domingo with David Ortiz and Pedro Martinez in the audience. "They said, 'It's really like this. This is how it is in the minor leagues. Everything we had to go through,'!" Perez Soto says. The movie was written and directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who cowrote the stark, critically acclaimed 2006 drama Half Nelson (which Fleck directed). Before writing the script for Sugar, they interviewed scores of former Dominican prospects in New York City and the Dominican Republic. "People were so open with their stories," Boden says. "They wanted to give us as much as we needed in order to make sure that this story was told in the right way." And in Sugar, it is. -- Melissa Segura

The Americans on the other end of the line told the Dominican infielder that -- out of the hundreds they'd scouted -- he was The One. They told him that he would travel to the United States, that he would have his shot at potential fame, possible fortune. As a kid growing up on the outskirts of the baseball mecca of San Pedro de Macorís, Algenis Pérez Soto had always longed to hear those words, but he figured they would have come from the mouths of baseball scouts, not filmmakers.

But there was one problem: After moviemakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck called to tell Pérez Soto he'd won the starring role in their new movie Sugar, they didn't think he wanted it. Boden and Fleck had sat through 600 auditions for the lead role of Miguel "Sugar" Santos, a Dominican pitcher trying to lift his family out of the depths of poverty with his knuckle curve. They'd watched -- amazed and saddened -- as they handed out the script to some of the young Dominicans auditioning, only to learn that they couldn't read, not even in their native language. And of those who could, some spouted out the stage directions and character names along with the dialogue, not knowing how a script should be read. And after all of the hours of auditioning, all those clamoring for the part, they'd picked the one who didn't seem to want it?

"I really wasn't interested," Pérez Soto said of when his older brother, Ángel, mentioned a movie audition. At 23, he had long since abandoned his dream of playing baseball as a career, but not as a hobby. That's why Pérez Soto shirked the audition Ángel had arranged, opting to be "a good Dominican," he says, by playing a pick-up baseball game scheduled for the same time instead. But by dint of fate or a small island -- take your pick -- Boden and Fleck's casting call was across the street from Pérez Soto's game. Boden and Fleck, who were looking anywhere and everywhere for their Miguel, simply shifted their audition to the field and stumbled across their no-show. Ángel scolded his brother for failing to show up, and the shamed Pérez Soto approached the moviemakers, who asked if he wanted to be an actor. "Yeah, of course," he told them. "But I just said that because I thought that was exactly what they wanted to hear," he says now, "but I really wasn't interested in being an actor because being an actor was something out of my world."

Impressed with his expressive eyes and ballplayer's body, they handed him a scene and asked him to return the next day. That night Pérez Soto studied the scene, one in which Miguel asks a Puerto Rican carpenter who has come to his aid who his favorite baseball player is.

"Jose Canseco," his sister, Omayra, read from the script (playing the part of the carpenter).

"Is that the best you can do?" Pérez Soto recited from the page.

But as he read through the lines, soon it wasn't just Miguel asking that question of the carpenter, it was Pérez Soto asking that of himself. By the end of the night, he'd committed not just his lines to memory, but himself to the project. "I went to the audition with another mind," he says. "I was already getting involved in this. In that moment, I wanted to be in this."

When he arrived the next day for his second audition, Boden and Fleck -- who earned critical acclaim for their debut film, Half Nelson, and an Oscar nomination for star Ryan Gosling -- were struck by Pérez Soto's skillful storytelling and quite confidence. "He is so expressive without doing anything at all," Boden says of Pérez Soto, the 452nd person to audition. "He just didn't seem like he was trying to impress us with anything," Fleck adds.

Convinced that they'd found their Miguel, Boden called Pérez Soto to tell him what she thought was the good news. What she heard on the other end of the phone, however, was a quiet, seemingly disinterested acceptance. "I was excited, but I was skeptical," Pérez Soto says. "I don't want to get so excited so that they could call me back and say, 'Oh, sorry, we found another guy. Sorry about that.' "

On the Third World island, many promises are as empty as wallets. Pérez Soto didn't expect a thing. But when the film crew showed up, cameras in tow, the former aspiring baseball player with zero acting experience was memorizing his lines, and in some cases, improving them. Boden, Fleck and Pérez Soto went through the script, line by line, to ensure that the language matched a 19-year-old Dominican's linguistic tendencies. "For example," Pérez Soto says referencing some of the movie's Spanish dialogue, "a boy like [Miguel] doesn't use the word bonita, we say 'heavy.' "

It isn't just improvements in language but conveyance of emotion where Pérez Soto shines. With his heavy-lidded eyes, he communicates the cultural dislocation Miguel feels when shipped off to Single-A ball in Iowa and the wide-eyed amazement at the discovery of the hotel minibar and adult movies on-demand.

The same attention to detail that Boden and Fleck paid to exacting the language of the film, they paid the precision of the game. They enlisted the help of 1990 World Series MVP José Rijo (and, no, the irony that they worked with Rijo, who is under federal investigation to see if he exploited baseball players in his native land, is not lost on the filmmakers). Rijo helped teach Pérez Soto, who had never pitched, proper mechanics. "Some people thought I did a good job because I was a baseball player," Pérez Soto says, "but [pitching] was one of the tougher parts of the movie for me."

Pérez Soto eventually mastered Miguel's biting curve -- the pitches filmed are the pitches he threw -- and he is now, in baseball parlance, a free agent. He lives outside of Boston now, watching his DVD collection of Prison Break, in order to improve his already proficient English and study the acting on screen.

"Now this is my dream to become an actor," he says.

He doesn't have any projects in the works, but his understated performance has garnered unanimous praise, even from some of the toughest critics. "David Ortiz, Pedro Martínez, they thought it was good," he says. "They think there's a second part. I said, 'No, there's not a second part. All those guys who play baseball, they don't have a second opportunity to come back.' "

But for a prospect who never made it, baseball may not have offered a second chance, but life offered a second act.

Sugar is rated R and opens in New York and Los Angeles April 3, and in most major metropolitans by May.