"Live to play, play to live."
That's the motto that the majority of young men growing up in the Dominican Republic live by. Baseball is more than a game - it's a reason for being.
The motto also happens to be the title of a documentary being created about the importance of baseball in the Dominican Republic.
Senior Josh Wolf spent his spring break editing footage of his winter break trip to the Dominican Republic. And it's not just any old home movie of a trip to tropical paradise; rather, Wolf and his friend Jon Paley, a senior at Washington University in St. Louis, have teamed up to create a documentary chronicling the long and difficult process young Dominican boys encounter when seeking contracts in professional baseball.
The footage, while strongly appealing in an aesthetic sense, also gets at the heart of the Dominican culture, at the root of which lies baseball and the hope for a better future that the sport can, in rare circumstances, provide. In making the film, Wolf and Paley are exposing some of the injustices in Major League Baseball's Dominican farm system through testimonials from children, parents, players and scouts, as well as some persuasive cultural imagery.
"The experience was really interesting for me," Paley said. "I've been studying film in theory and some practice in school, but usually they control the process a lot. But this is so much different. Being in the field, anything can and does happen.
"You've just got to roll with the punches, and that's what we did. Our best stuff was accidental - stuff we just stumbled on by chance. The stuff we thought was going to be the best turned out to not be nearly as interesting as the things we weren't expecting."
"As filmmakers, we can't always offer a solution to the problem," Wolf added. "By shedding light on the system, we can open a dialogue to help improve it and be more socially responsible."
The system refers to the way in which numerous "baseball academies" established in the Dominican are taking boys aged 12 to 14 off of the poverty-stricken streets and putting them through an intensive four- to five-year process of learning baseball and baseball only, with no other education, in the hope of one day playing in the major leagues.
Of course, the injustice lies in the fact that only around 2 percent of players that get through even the first few stages of the process ever make it to the big leagues.
Essentially, the life cycle of these young Dominican kids goes like this: first is the incubation of the passion for baseball. These kids grow up with their families pushing them to play baseball so that one day they might have a better life. Baseball is all they do, out on the streets, every day.
The next step is the buscón, or scouting phase. Scouts wander the streets, searching for players with potential. Then the film follows the kids near to being signed and entering the academy. It shows the academy life, the players' daily routines and, eventually, the pros, for the few players who make it through to Class A minor league baseball.
The final section of the film shows the alternative to playing baseball, which, as Wolf explains, is not much. The Dominican Republic has a profound level of poverty due to extremely high unemployment. Typically' one is either involved in tourism, the sugar cane industry, crime or baseball. The baseball academy system, according to Wolf, can be extremely helpful in giving a new life to a few young boys as well as fueling the economy with money from Major League Baseball, but at the same time, it is exploiting the players for their young talent and severely neglects the lives of the boys. Several years of playing baseball to no avail leaves these players with few options.
"Kids will try 40 or 50 times to make it into the academy," Wolf said. "It makes sense because they can always go work on the sugar cane plantations, so while they're still young enough, they continue to try to make it."
According to Wolf, the system is severely flawed and socially irresponsible, which he will try to show in his film.
"This is an opportunity to create change," Wolf said. "We're trying to help kids get to schools and educate them, but the process is all business-oriented, so everything is focused on the team rather than the players. It wouldn't cost a lot for the organizations to be more socially responsible; plus, it could pay dividends for the team to educate the boys. The intelligent players are often more successful than the ones who only have the physical ability."
Wolf hopes that the final version of the film, which has yet to be completed, can follow a few particular players through the process in order to help give the documentary a particular character rather than taking an outsider's perspective.
"We're trying to put a face on the issues at stake within the academy system and to help people see how dramatic and profound they are," Wolf said.
"We're taking this one step at a time, trying to get funding and everything to make this whole thing possible," Paley added.
The idea for making the film started off as a way to spend time in Latin America, a place where Wolf has traveled many times. After ruling out the Peace Corps, he combined his love of baseball, his knowledge of the academy system and his love of Latin America to formulate plans for a winter vacation project. However, despite the hours of footage and the general formation of a mini-documentary on the subject so far, Wolf hopes that he will be able to return to the Dominican Republic for an entire summer to do a much more in-depth and personalized feature film on the injustices of the system.
Above all, the filmmaking process has been successful thanks to the intersection of two passions: the Dominicans' zest for baseball and Wolf's passion for Dominican culture.
"This entire project has only succeeded so far because of the kindness and trust we have received from complete strangers," Wolf wrote in his blog, Béisbol Dominicana. "While we obviously are still cautious about crime, getting taken advantage of and whatnot, we have learned also that there is a lot of goodness in Dominican people and that people here are truly eager to become good friends with everyone they meet."
