Filmmaker aims to inspire mentoring in inner city
Andres Torres stood up and got in a hitting stance, an imaginary bat in his hands, as he demonstrated the proper way to load up to whack a pitch with full impact.
The other panelists and the audience at the Bayview Opera House watched in amusement and appreciation as the former San Francisco Giants outfielder broke into an impromptu coaching clinic, his weight shifting to his back leg as he coiled to strike the ball, if there had been one.
Torres was one of the speakers during a Q&A session after a screening of
Ghost Town to Havana, a 2015 documentary that tells the story of the Oakland youth team that traveled to Cuba in 2010 and came away with lessons in baseball and life.
The movie has made the rounds at smaller film festivals, earning enthusiastic responses from audiences and awards at Syracuse and Sebastopol last year but not widespread distribution.
So Berkeley filmmaker Eugene Corr is engaging in a local barnstorming tour, offering free screenings at Bay Area sites in hopes of inspiring men and women to volunteer as coaches and mentors for inner-city kids. That’s the larger message of the documentary, with two such figures — Roscoe Bryant in Oakland and Nicolas Reyes in Havana — playing the roles of protagonists.
“I wanted to celebrate two coaches in two communities that were struggling,” said Corr, the son of a baseball coach who played youth baseball before finding his niche in writing and directing movies. “I wanted to make a film about two men I consider heroes.”
As the leadoff hitter and center fielder of the 2010 Giants, Torres was one of the heroes of the team that brought San Francisco its first World Series champi- onship, which he celebrated by jumping off his parade float and walking part of the route to greet fans.
His presence lent local star power to Tuesday’s screening but also came with a sense of poignancy. Torres’ high school sweetheart and wife of nearly 18 years, Soannie, died in December of a rare form of cancer at 37.
Torres, the father of a 12year-old boy and a 4-yearold girl, was a frequent contributor to the Giants’ community outreach efforts during his time with the team (2009-2011 and 2013) and wanted to lend his support to the film’s cause.
A former track athlete who didn’t start playing baseball in his native Puerto Rico until age 16, Torres shared his story of perseverance. He played 12 years in the minor leagues with only occasional call-ups before establishing himself in the majors at 31, all the while battling attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
“I remember my first year playing baseball, I went to a tryout in my hometown and they cut me,” Torres said. “So I went to a tryout in another place. We can teach our kids that we learn from our failures. I didn’t make the team, so I said, ‘I need to work harder.’ ”
Like many in the audi- ence, Torres was moved by the documentary’s depiction of the two coaches as influential figures in the lives of countless kids. While Reyes makes his living as a coach — although a meager one with a salary of $14 a month — Bryant works security at night and runs his free baseball program in the afternoons.
His Oakland Royals have grown into a year-round operation that provides playing opportunities for about 80 kids, the majority African American, in four age categories.
With no previous coaching experience — he didn’t even play baseball growing up in Ohio — Bryant first got involved in 2004 along with his then-wife Lehi as a way to offer their children and other local kids a safe activity away from the notoriously violent streets of their Ghost Town neighborhood in West Oakland.
In the film, Bryant recalls when a teen victim of a drive-by shooting died in his arms, prompting him to take action. He thought the area lacked positive role models like the ones he often saw in his youth, and he wanted to give kids a healthy outdoors option.
“Unlike the computers and all these electronic gadgets, in baseball you actually have to interact with anoth- er human being,” said Bryant, 53. “So you’re picking up social skills, you’re learning how to work through adversity. You’re down 10-0, you don’t give up. There are so many beautiful things you can get out of baseball besides just hit the ball, run and catch.”
He saw that in the bonding between his team and the Cuban kids during the one-week trip, despite the language barrier.
The journey required a year-and-a-half of fundraising and organizing, and the Royals had only enough money to send nine players, which made things dicey when one threw a tantrum and initially walked out on his team. Bryant, now the de facto parent of one of the players, handled the situation with tough love.
For a group of youngsters who, in some cases, had not even crossed the Bay Bridge, the experience was unforgettable.
“It put a different value on life for them,” Bryant said. “They saw a lot of kids who had little or nothing but were still happy. We come from a very materialistic society, and they realized all these things they have weren’t as important as they thought. They got a different look at life in general, what’s important and what’s not.”