Minor Leagues/Major Dreams (1993)

Forget your highlight tapes and sepia-tinted nostalgia riffs, the real soul of pro baseball lies three leagues below the majors — where teenage phenoms find out if they're for real and suspects are weeded from prospects. Observant documentarian Nathan Kaufman spent the 1991 season with the Oaks (a Minnesota Twins farm team), recording the dreary bus rides, junk-food orgies, locker-room pranks, public ordeals, and private crises. Most of all on Minor Leagues/Major Dreams, he succeeds brilliantly in profiling a handful of prototypical players and, through them, the undimmed dreams of athletes everywhere. A