"Pelotero" translates to Ballplayer in English, and that is exactly what over one hundred thousand teenage boys in the Dominican Republic are trying to become. The documentary tells the story of baseball scouting in the Dominican Republic. Twenty percent of the professional baseball players today started their journey in the Dominican Republic. Although, who's paying attention to the exploitation and injustice they go through along the way? Some of those players signing for as little as four thousand dollars, whereas their American counterparts are signing for millions. Ballplayer: Pelotero peers into the side of Dominican baseball that we don't often look at. Instead of just seeing the great success stories on ESPN, they travel down to the …show more content…
It takes a look at the overly complicated signing of two top prospects Miguel Angel Sano, and Juan Carlos Batista. The film is co-directed by Jonathan Paley, Ross Finkel and Trevor Martin, narrated by John Leguizamo, and produced by Bobby Valentine. Throughout the eight months, you will watch Sano and Batista’s story unravel, which happens to be an extremely complicated endeavor that no one would have anticipated. However, their story, although an important one, refuses to shy away from the fact that scouting process in the Dominican Republic shows to be a potentially exploitative one.
Kicking it off with Miguel, he was the top prospect in the Dominican that year. Every team wanted him, and they were willing to offer him millions in bonuses for his talent. However, there were some teams that wanted him just as bad as the others but didn’t have the money to win the bidding war. In this case, that team was the Pittsburgh Pirates. The talent scout for the Pirates in the Dominican, Rene Gayo, went to no end to try to ensure that Miguel would sign with them. He even went to the point of getting an investigation started into Miguel's age so that he would not be able to sign on signing