Moneyball - the movie

so, is it really that good?

Good discussion here: Moneyball

thanks. i'm not a baseball fan so i've never been there..

It's being beat out by the werewolf from Twilight.

wld not like to get beat off by a teenage werewolf

Casual fans or non-fans more apt to like it, imo. It was made for them.

so ill like it...

"The Social Network of baseball movies?"

No, there's an adult at the center. (And a worse director.)

I love Hoffman in this. He plays Capote's polar opposite.

Also love the focus on reaction shots in many of the central scenes.

Not enough of Hoffman for me to love or hate him.

On the other hand, Arliss Howard...

easily my fave Arliss H performance since Full Metal Jacket, but I can't remember any others.

Hoffman's Howe is a typical boring docudrama villain... Let's turn a guy who's a professional in his business into this 100% asshole, instead of a worthy antagonist. So boring. (Same with the chorus of scouts.)

btw, Art Howe and Billy Beane:

http://a.espncdn.com/photo/2009/0726/otl_a_bbeanets3_600.jpg

I'm surprised you loved the Pitt-Howard scene, Morbs, considering your contempt for Sorkin; the scene epitomizes his rat-tat-tat style.

not really since Howard (and John Henry IRL) seem to have just been awakened.

Maybe also since it's a scene about moneyball instead of BB's goddamn daughter or his failures as a player.

maybe it takes being a father to appreciate Beane's daughter's mawkish number. Of course, were she a Swedish pop star it would be genius.

could only think of

http://wgtccdn.wegotthiscovered.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/4-03-Promo-Photos-californication-17507249-500-333.jpg

just saw this. it sure was a movie, in the finest tradition of movies. Pretty much the Slumdog Millionaire of baseball.

complete w/ closing musical number

also as for guitar my only thought was
http://cdn-i.dmdentertainment.com/funpages/cms_content/16161/juno_guitar.jpg

For the first minute of the Boston scene, I thought Arliss H was David Strathairn.

Michael Lewis chimes in on Keith Law chiming in

(n.b. I know nothing about baseball, season by season. Like Lewis but never read this book, either. So I'm probably the right audience for this.)

Oh, and, as someone knowing nothing beyond the very basics of the story before seeing the movie, it didn't make sense why Beane would get all the glory and how he would even be able to operate without Jonah Hill in the back room crunching numbers for him.

Well, one man doesn't get all the glory... because Jonah Hill doesn't really exist, Beane was actually introduced to sabermetrics six years before the film begins, etc etc.

Yeah, the film isn't exactly true-to-life and omits some key details (didnt Giambi cost the A's that playoff series by not sliding into home? you'd think they'd at least mention that)

That said, my wife enjoyed it and had no idea that Oakland even had a team. I mean I was going to like this movie anyway so the real test is if she could like it as a non-baseball fan. The parts with his daughter though were pretty cringe-worthy, I have no idea what she's supposed to represent, and lets face it Billy Beane was never in any real danger of losing his job. It's not like the movie wasn't long enough!

btw by Giambi I mean Jeremy

Don't you realize what going into details like the Jeremy G slide would do to the civilian viewers? "Guy made a bad play, why didn't he get rid of him?"

It's not like the movie wasn't long enough!

No, the problem with this film is that it exists, and it has a credit "Story by Not-Michael-Lewis".

I dont have a problem with it existing. There's no way this movie could satisfy the hardcore baseball fanatics and the casual moviegoers. I do find some parts of it strange though, they get a lot of obscure details right, and yet seem to forget that Jeremy Giambi was an A for like 2 years before they supposedly 'acquired' him.

Michael Lewis chimes in on Keith Law chiming in

― Corn Maze to the Dark Side (Eazy), Sunday, September 25, 2011 10:34 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

here's the key quote from lewis:

"I don't understand why he goes from being -- when I interviewed Keith Law, and I did, at length -- he was so nasty about scouts and scouting culture and the stupidity of baseball insiders. He was the reductio ad absurdum of the person who was the smarty pants who had been brought into the game and was smarter than everybody else. He alienated people. And now he's casting himself as someone who sees the value of the old school. I can't see where this is all heading and why. But I learned from experience that the best thing to do is ignore it, because it goes away."

keith law actually addressed this in a recent podcast. here's the transcript:

http://www.drunkjaysfans.com/2011/09/layin-down-law-keith-law-on-scouts.html

When Michael [Lewis] interviewed me for Moneyball-- there was one long interview in particular in my office in Toronto; I can still picture where he sat, where I sat-- this was 2002. I was 28 or 29, less than a year into my job with the Blue Jays, which was my first job in baseball at all.

Before that I had been a freelance writer, a little for ESPN and a lot for Baseball Prospectus. I was very much a stats guy-- only a stats guy-- I had no scouting experience.

I was hired by JP Ricciardi-- who was the the General Manager, who came out of Oakland, worked for Billy Beane-- who had been a scout, but did not respect scouts or scouting. In fact, one of Ricciardi's favourite things to do, especially the first six months or so I was there, was call me into his office-- or sometimes just call me on the phone, if I was still in Massachusetts-- he'd pull out this binder-- this gives you a sense of how long ago this was-- this binder that had all of our printed scouting reports that amateur and pro scouts had turned in on all of these players that they'd seen, and he would pick a player that he liked. "Hey, let's go see what our genius scout said about Eric Hinske!" And I could still remember-- I know who the scout was, the scout's now a cross-checker with a National League club, and a friend of mine-- "You know what!? This idiot, he thinks Eric Hinske's an org. player!"-- which means a guy with basically with no Major League value, a guy who's good for a Double-A or Triple-A roster but that's about it-- which was a little light, but what is Eric Hinske? He's an extra player in the big leagues. I don't think that's a disastrous report. But this was how Ricciardi viewed scouts, particularly the Blue Jays scouts he inherited. And he ended up firing, or not renewing, more than half of the scouting staff, as I can remember-- many of whom have gone on to senior positions in other scouting departments.

So... I'm not trying to make an excuse here, but just to give you an idea of my mindset at the time. My whole baseball universe was my own work as an analyst, and the guy who brought me into baseball, who was my boss and somebody I admired at the time and was trying to learn from, telling me, "Most scouts are useless," even though he had been a scout himself. And at the time that I sat down with Lewis, I was giving him the party line-- something I believed in, absolutely. That was nine years ago, give or take a few months, and I've only spoken to Michael once or twice since then-- I did talk to him a year or two later; he was planning to do a follow-up book that I think fizzled because the players drafted in the so-called "Moneyball Draft" didn't work out as well as hoped.

About two years, two-and-a-half years after that-- so 2004, 2005-- it became pretty clear to me that we were failing. And this was one of the major reasons I left Toronto. There were a couple-- that's a topic for another day-- but, it wasn't working. The stat-heavy approach was... we were basically two steps behind. What we were trying to do was what Oakland had been doing around 2000 or so, and the Red Sox and the Cardinals and the Padres and one or two other clubs-- Cleveland-- they were pretty clearly adopting some of these same methods. And we were left in the situation-- kind of a similar situation to where we were before we even got there, which was that we weren't innovating fast enough, and the market had become too competitive for the limited type of player we were going for.

It really became apparent to me in the draft room. I remember Tony LaCava-- who is still there, who is Alex Anthopoulos's right-hand man in Toronto-- independently had realized the same thing, which was we were killing ourselves, especially in the draft, because we would only take college players with "acceptable" stats. And that's such a narrow pool, especially when five or six teams are all going for the same type of player. You get to the third or fourth round and you're done. There's nobody on the board you think could even be an average regular in the big leagues.

He and I both spent a lot of time between the '04 and '05 drafts, and again between '05 and '06, trying to convince Ricciardi, "We've got to change this; we've got to incorporate more scouting into our process; we have to be willing to look at high school players; we have to be willing to take some of these higher risk tool players who maybe don't have the perfectly acceptable stat line but give us some upside, some chance to look for hidden value that other clubs aren't identifying." And one of the reasons I left in 2006 was the recognition that this approach-- this so-called "new school" or "Moneyball" approach-- was not going to work. Was never going to work. And they ended up scrapping it after I left.

But while I was there I worked with many scouts-- like I said, some of whom have gone on to success with other clubs, many of whom are friends of mine now, and I have to say, many of whom tried to open my mind in 2002, 2003, when I was not open-minded, when I was 28, 29, and walked in the door and was told, "You're here, you're gonna replace ten scouts with the work you do." And I believed it, which was a terrible mistake on my part.

I recognize that Chris Buckley, now the scouting director with the Reds, and Tim Wilken, who's the scouting director with the Cubs-- these guys were trying to help me. Trying to open my mind. Mike Cadahia-- who is a cross-checker who was just let go from Seattle, but who is, I think, a very good scout and a very good person, and I hope to see him land somewhere soon-- he was trying. These guys were trying to help me realize that there are more ways to do this. And the more inputs you have, the more information you have, the better the decisions you're going to make.

Part of what I came to ESPN with in 2006 was this vision for a different kind of writing that incorporated everything. And so, when Michael Lewis claims that I was nasty about scouts and scouting culture, there's a kernel of truth inside the caricature which he paints-- which is kind of what he did to several people in the book-- Paul DePodesta, I think; there's a kernel of truth to the caricature of DePodesta in the book Moneyball. But to say that I'm "casting" myself "as someone who sees the value of the old school?" No, I see the value of the old school, and have for five or six years now. And I have tried-- I won't sit here and tell you I'm successful-- but I've really tried to incorporate both of those things into my writing.

And, I have to say, a lot of the credit for that goes to LaCava, Buckley, Wilken, Cadahia and Billy Moore, and Jeff Taylor, and Mike Mangan-- these are all people that I worked with in Toronto, and I'm apologizing for forgetting ten other people I should be crediting here. But they worked with me, they opened my mind, they showed me the beginnings of how to evaluate, but at a time when I wasn't receptive to it. They tried to show me the importance of this old school, of scouting players from a traditional perspective. It just all caught up to me-- two, three years after the fact-- that they were trying to help me, and that I had kind of missed out-- maybe set myself back in the process. And leaving for ESPN kind of gave me the opportunity to start over and make this major change to my philosophy of baseball, which is what I think you've seen over the last couple of years in my writing.

OK, now we're putting hardcore baseball stuff in the ILE thread, and getting general movie comments in the ILB thread...

they get a lot of obscure details right, and yet seem to forget that Jeremy Giambi was an A for like 2 years before they supposedly 'acquired' him

It's dramatic condensation. They didn't forget it, it gives Brad Pitt 3 names to throw up on the magnetic board.

This happened at the cineplex where I saw it, too. (Not sure about the tears part.)

People are strange.

also, last night's collective baseball epic was so much larger than some mall movie.

My Facebook this morning was cluttered with crazed posts by people not ordinarily awake at midnight.

yeah what the Rays are pulling off is way more exciting than anything Billy Beane has ever done

like seriously, my thought during Moneyball was "if this was scripted, it could be a great story". now this happens, you can't even script it better than that

what the Rays are pulling off (? we don't know what they're pulling off yet) is way more exciting than anything BRAD PITT has ever done

(well, except maybe for Fight Club)

(and that stoner cameo in True Romance)

i liked this a lot, and i said as much on the other thread, but i did go to the bathroom during one of the daughter scenes. i suggest doing that too!

the Rays are taking everything to the next level though. they're practically abusing the way the draft is set up to wind up with like 25% of the picks in the first few rounds by letting all their FA's walk, they sign impact players while under team control before their value rises, plus they employ a complex system of defensive shifts which has saved over 100 runs more than the next best system. yesterday (or this month's?) drama isn't really related, but it's a hell of a story. and unlike the A's, Tampa is actually made the World Series, and they compete DIRECTLY with the Yankees and Red Sox, while the A's would just have to get through them in the playoffs

oh wait this is the ILE thread

Yeah, but the story of the movie (since it knows what happened in the years after the 2003 book) ends with everyone else discovering what he popularized -- so he's back at his original level of disadvantage!

michael lewis and tabitha soren are the coaches for the LL t-ball team my son is playing against next week.

I see variations on this periodically--thought this one was funny.

https://i.postimg.cc/85XMkp4s/luka.jpg