Slug It Out
Sanremo Baseball Club plays a sport most of Italy ignores, in a country where soccer swallows nearly all the attention and money. The film traces the club's history from its founding during the Second World War through decades of scraped-together budgets, borrowed equipment, and players who show up because they love the game rather than for any prospect of a career. Interviews with team members lay out the daily math of running a baseball club in a place with no youth pipeline and little sponsorship, while archival material fills in how the team survived stretches when it nearly folded. The film stays close to Sanremo itself, a small coastal town, rather than widening into a national survey of Italian baseball, and it treats the club's persistence as the actual story rather than a backdrop to something bigger. What comes through is less a sports triumph than an account of upkeep: how a marginal team keeps itself alive season after season with no guarantee anyone outside the dugout is watching.