Real Moms on the realities of losing the baby weight, On the day he found out they were going to make a movie about him, the first person Miguel Angel Sano told was his mom. "I'm gonna be famous," he said.
He spoke with the wonderment of an impoverished 15-year-old, which the world believed he was at the time. It is not that simple, of course, in the Dominican Republic. Something so fundamental as age is often a matter of dispute. The truth is pliable in the D.R. It bends and bows, molds itself to personal convenience, buoys those willing to exploit it. It is not supposed to do such things. The truth is supposed to be the truth, reality, a rock for the innocent, but then this is the Dominican Republic, where fact takes on multiple incarnations.
One truth, in Miguel Sano's case, emanates from the mouth of a man named Rene Gayo. He sits in an old Victorian chair. He is fat and mustachioed. His parents emigrated from Cuba to the United States, where he grew up and pursued a career in baseball – a career, by many accounts, filled with success. He has survived for more than a decade signing Latin American teenagers in hopes they grow into major league baseball players, first with the Cleveland Indians and today with the Pittsburgh Pirates. And he wants badly to sign another, who happens to be sitting in the room.

Gayo is in San Pedro de Macorís, a baseball hotbed and home of Sano, the most talented player to come out of the Dominican Republic in years. It is August 2009, more than a month after July 2, the magical day that Major League Baseball pours tens of millions of dollars into the Dominican economy. The truth is Sano is a star no matter how old he is, the sort of talent after whom teams lust. The truth isn't enough. Nobody wants to sign Sano after MLB spent months probing his age and identity. He has undergone DNA tests and bone scans, shown his hospital and school records, consented to the league's every request to verify he is indeed now 16 years old and his real name is Miguel Angel Sano.
Sano's parents believe Gayo knows why such questions emerged in the first place, and they have asked him to their house to explain. Their truth is rooted as much in speculation as anything. They believe Gayo has manufactured rumors that Sano is older than he claims to scare off other teams and drive his signing bonus demands down from the $6 million many expected him to receive. The Pirates are the only team still offering Sano a contract. They want to sign him for $2 million.
And Gayo says Melania Sano, her husband, Elvin Francisco, and all nine of the other people living in their home have every right to be mad. He trusts that Miguel is who he says he is and how old he says he is, that it shouldn't be this way, a teenager paying for the sins of peers and elders alike.
"Unfortunately," Rene Gayo says, "this is the country of lies."
On he goes, simultaneously charming and combative, playing the ally and the businessman, completely unaware of the one unimpeachable truth on that summer evening.
A hidden camera is capturing every word he speaks.
Let's try again: The truth doesn't exist here. The Dominican Republic is a web and wasteland of hustlers and pimps, moneymakers and moneytakers. It is a place where age and identity are transient, where pre-teens get shot with steroids, where the privileged have preyed on the poor, where an alleged child molester trained teenage boys for more than 20 years, where a baseball subculture has grown out of a shadow economy and into a cash crop.
MLB made a Faustian bargain with the Dominican Republic that it can neither clean up nor break, the fraud too deeply rooted in the system and the player pipeline too important to its daily operations. And because it happens in a place of immense poverty, where little English is spoken and less attention paid, baseball skates by with the overwhelming majority of its fan base unaware that the foreign country producing the largest number of major league players does so with a factory-farm mentality, its waste and runoff polluting all that surrounds it.

A new documentary, "Ballplayer: Pelotero," does its best to elucidate the dichotomy of the D.R. It follows Sano and another teenage prospect, Jean Carlos Batista, as they approach the Dominican Christmas, July 2. The movie provides an incisive look at the machine that churns out talent and the consequences it wreaks on the players, their families and baseball writ large.
Sano dropped out of school at 12 to enroll in the Dominican baseball machine full-time. The trainers, known as buscones, seek the most talented kids on the island and house them, feed them and clothe them in exchange for 25 to 35 percent of their signing bonus when they turn 16, MLB's minimum age for foreign players. Teams signed almost 400 Dominican players last year. They spent upward of $90 million on international players, the majority of that going to Dominicans.
It's not just the exorbitant money that urges players and trainers to resort to any and all means. Even meager bonuses of $10,000 represent a windfall to the 42.2 percent of Dominicans who, according to U.S. government statistics, live below the poverty line.
"I do believe there are some issues that are inherent to the country and to its culture – the poverty – that are going to make it difficult for baseball ever to be completely confident the signing of players is totally above board and consistent with what we would expect to be good standards of conducting business," said Mets general manager Sandy Alderson, who previously spent a year working for MLB trying to overhaul its Dominican operations. "At the same time, MLB cannot just sit idly and allow these things to happen. If nothing else, it can hold these clubs accountable for the things that happen there and do as much as it can to police the market."
One of baseball's problems is retrograde hypocrisy. For decades, MLB treated the Dominican Republic, an island of about 10 million, as its plantation. The league preferred players use buscones – often poorly educated themselves – to negotiate contracts instead of player agents. While the current generation of stars fetched healthy bonuses, the parasitic relationship limited David Ortiz's signing bonus to $10,000. Pedro Martinez got $6,500, Sammy Sosa $3,500, Miguel Tejada $2,000.
All of the usual trappings of money accompanied its injection into the Dominican baseball world: deceit, greed, ugliness. As one teenager in "Pelotero," which means ballplayer in Spanish, admits: "A lot of us have pulled off tricks so we can sign. People change their ages and all that. But that's what you have to do."

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