I DON’T CARE IF I NEVER GET BACK: Algenis Perez Soto (center) in the clubhouse.

Of all athletic contests, baseball is the most susceptible to sentimentalism. So much about the game feels so clean: its numerical symmetry, the way its vast possibilities gradually sharpen to a single pitch and, of course, the much-lauded pastoral quality, which invites people to spend their afternoons watching other people standing in a meadow. And the cinema has been a sucker, starting with The Pride of the Yankees and continuing through The Natural, Bull Durham, A League of Their Own and two iterations of Angels in the Outfield. There’s no crying in baseball? There’s plenty of crying in baseball movies—good, cleansing blubbers for a simpler time. It says something about the pastime’s sacred status that its worst scandal, the Black Sox World Series rigging, was made into Field of Dreams, a Kevin Costner tearjerker about the sport’s eternal innocence.

But baseball isn’t clean—a fact that has never been more inescapable than right now, amid BALCO lists and a certain Yankees slugger who has become anything but a source of pride. That’s why Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s sophomore picture, Sugar, couldn’t be timelier. A drama following a Dominican pitcher’s perplexed rise toward the majors, it isn’t a seedy tell-all—though like Boden and Fleck’s last movie, the freebasin’-with-Ryan Gosling flick Half Nelson, it squarely faces drug abuse (specifically the popping of amphetamines, or “greenies,” which has been an open secret in baseball for decades). Instead, it has the spare grace that the sport aspires to. The movie’s greater achievement, however, is its evocation of how the loss of innocence feels, as life’s many possibilities narrow to hard choices, and 27 outs shrink to none.

Sugar’s most conventional scenes are at the beginning, and are dispensed with quickly. Miguel “Sugar” Santos is a 20-year-old kid with a whip for a right arm and a tryout spot in the Dominican scouting camp of the Kansas City Knights (a version of the Royals, thinly fictionalized since Major League Baseball won’t get within 90 feet of a movie with greenies). He hails from a town that is rather conveniently paradisiacal and supportive—though even here traces of sadness intrude, as when a fellow prospect is cut from the farm system and is given a drunken serenade of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” by his teammates, even though they know he’s been taken out of the ballgame.

The movie finds its bearings as soon as Miguel is stripped of his: He’s flown to spring training in Phoenix and then to Single-A ball in the Quad Cities, though not before meeting a host of previously unknown relatives, who are eager to regale him with stories of their shared youth. (“You were, like, 8 and terrified of goats.”) He also gets advice from an actual uncle: “Life gives you plenty of opportunities. Baseball gives you just one.” The horizons of that chance seem limitless, though, and Sugar easily captures the exhilarating freshness of discovering you can actually justify the expectations of the people back home. As Miguel, the newly discovered Algenis Perez Soto is a marvel—winsomely shy, secretly a little too pleased with his gifts, and bewildered by a language barrier that keeps him ordering French toast at every meal in his alien surroundings.

That exotic place is Iowa, where Miguel is welcomed by a clan of Presbyterians who house minor leaguers every season and are very hospitable, though they really could have learned a little Spanish by now. Sugar, too, is generous: Boden and Fleck see America through the eyes of a newcomer without reducing it to a heartless monolith (as is the trend in immigration films like Maria Full of Grace). Which makes it all the more poignant when the movie shifts away from its inspirational track. Miguel’s potential is tapped, he makes his decisive plays, and the movie quietly examines an unmistakable truth: Baseball seems clean because it discards so many people, and life is dear simply because it keeps going on, messily. Yankee Stadium is seen in Sugar via only a tantalizing glimpse, and the movie travels on to a small park named for Roberto Clemente, where real ballplayers recite the teams they nearly starred for. It is a field of dreams deferred.