Anthony Alcade’s documentary film Buscón pulled together two great Dominican preoccupations: film and baseball, and the passion really showed at the panel afterwards where baseball stars were pulled from the crowded audience to join the increasingly crowded panel on stage where eventually they were joined by the Republic’s official number one baseball fan, President Leonel Fernández.

Buscónes are talent scouts who scour Latin America looking for promising young baseball players they can recruit and train for baseball leagues in the US, and the director looks at through the experiences in Nicaragua where baseball enthusiasts coach and organize local leagues only to see their most promising players signed up and taken away, lured by sums that seem huge to them, but are a pittance in the US.  Some such as Juan Marechal, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Christian Gusman, Pedro Martinez,  on the panel became successful and famous.

But for each such success, as the film showed, there were many rejected and who returned, with no education and few prospects. One panelist described the Buscónes as a “necessary evil,” whose talent spotting had provided bright futures for at least some young baseball players.

The film clearly rang a chord with the audience and panelists, commentators and baseball greats of several generations, some of whom compared the US major leagues’ large investment in the Dominican Republic with outsourcing. In effect, they accused, while Baseball Majors were investing some $100 million a year in the Dominican Republic, they were sourcing future baseball stars on the cheap.

Together they stressed the need for access to education for the aspirant baseball stars, since even a successful baseball career only lasts a small part of a life time - an education lasts for ever. And of course Anthony Alcade shows that there are ways other than playing baseball to achieve success - like filmmaking.

 

See additional photos of this event in our Photo Gallery under Santo Domingo - Centro Cultural Mauricio Baez - Buscón: Buscador / Estafador- Nov. 19, 2010>

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