Moneyball

my shit doesn't work at the oscars

lol

haha

Aaron Sorkin's shit has worked at the Oscars.

I'll be more interested to see how this does at the b.o. on the second weekend.

caught a matinee. i didnt think this was a BAD movie, but i found it deeply unsatisfying. the director's style is pretty understated - there were times i appreciated the subdued approach, and times where it felt like it was just flat, like he didn't have a real point of view. i think klaw actually nailed that:

The lack of multi-dimensional characters is exacerbated by the languid, aimless plot and stop-and-start pacing. The film mopes through Opening Day and the beginning of the A’s season, races through their midyear turnaround, then jumps through most of the winning streak until the twentieth victory, at which point we’re handed slow motion views of the A’s blowing an 11-0 lead … and of Art Howe thinking, with no sound at all. Even the paces of conversations are strange and often forced; one of the “action” scenes, if I could call it that, involves watching Billy juggle three GMs (Shapiro, Phillips, and Sabean) to try to acquire Ricardo Rincon. All three GMs come off as stooges, but more importantly, it’s boring as hell to watch anyone, even Brad Pitt, talk on the phone.

the pacing felt to me like that of a movie that wasn't sure what it wanted to be. i think it was worst of both worlds disease - shunting aside the specifics of what made the original story interesting in favor of some human drama that nobody could possibly find compelling. the complaint about the phone scene, which i thought seemed dumb on the page (why can't a phone conversation be cinematic?)(and it also seems like a dumb complaint when you're bitching about beane being shown flying out to conduct a trade - which is it pal, c'mon) suddenly comes to life when u see the movie - it's just FLAT. i dont need quick cuts, slamming phones and screaming, but something was off about that sequence.

pitt's good though. it's nicely shot. i wasn't sure if hoffman would be convincing as art howe of all people, but he owned pretty hard. i should probably quit doubting that guy. and pena isn't depicted as sullen at all (one of klaw's characteristically weird complaints that makes sense only to himself)

The reason the first "Rincon" scene w/ Shapiro is not done on the phone is that the second one has to be. I mean, KLaw even admits to understanding this.

he does? where?

he wrote something like "it's boring to watch ppl on the phone, even Brad Pitt"

so Eric H and I are about 25% of the film critics writing in English who dislike this.

Mixed, officially.

+ 25% of the reason I hate it is manhandling the Twins

Mine is mixed too... 2 out of 4 is mixed anywhere but in a Rotten Tomatoes world.

You did a fine job writing about this for a non-seamhead, except you don't understand the Twins thing. The A's didn't lose to the Twins because of payroll.The A's didn't even lose to the Yankees in '01 because of payroll. They lost in a short series because of what Beane calls "fucking luck," or more specifically because Jeremy Giambi didn't slide into home plate. (OF course, this movie doesn't even have Jeremy Giambi on the team in 2001, but never mind.) Short series are much less subject to probability than a regular season, by definition (ie, small sample size). Thus Billy Beane's "shit doesn't work in the playoffs."

You can learn more at the SABR convention in Minneapolis in late June.

always found it a bit absurd that a billion game season comes down to a 7 game series. it's true in every sport, but in baseball especially.

much worse w/ one and done playoffs, like pro football

yeah, but football plays once a week.
"We do this every day." - Earl Weaver

I wonder if there's someone who's done the math comparing comparing how 'accurate' american sports playoffs are (w/r/t the statistical best team winning the title.) I would imagine baseball > basketball >>> football >>>>> college football >>>>>>>>>> college basketball

wait what why do you have baseball first?

fewer teams in the playoff than the nba + longest regular season. but I guess the seeding is often less fair? I don't follow basketball very closely tho. also there's not one single measure for 'statistical best', which means someone would still have to be drawing a lot of lines in the sand. but it'd be interesting to read.

i'm sure nate silver either has done that or would do so in a heartbeat

i'd also guess that you're overestimating baseball - i wouldn't be surprised if both nba & nfl were better at this (i'd guess nba would have the best)

couple of things tho, one is with baseball especially you should just throw the world series out and focus on if the best team in each league wins the pennant. also baseball might benefit from the fact that there are only two rounds - fewer chances to get upset

well it's more like the series are so short that they're quite often dominated by luck. i see yr point re: fewer teams making it more likely that the "best" one wins but the baseball playoffs seem almost meaningless at this point.

from a non-stat perspective i've always felt that the nba playoffs are great at determining which team is "really" the best.

xpost

I think maybe a big difference is that in the NBA there's a ton of activity going on throughout a game so although one player could have a bad game you expect it to weigh out a little over the course of the forty-eight minutes depending on how much that player plays. he may get to take numerous shots over the course of just one game giving him a much better pool of probability. if a baseball player is having a bad game he only goes up to bat ~4 times and you can just have 4 bad at-bats that indicate nothing about the overall quality of the player. extrapolate to a full series. --> haven't thought carefully about this but it occurs to me this is a meaningful difference

Basketball is generally the most accurate, I believe.

there's no way the nfl is better at it w/ the way a playoff is set up, but I think a 'bad' football team is less likely to beat a 'good' football team on any given day than in basketball or baseball. but that margin is also hard to measure.

xp

You did a fine job writing about this for a non-seamhead, except you don't understand the Twins thing. The A's didn't lose to the Twins because of payroll.The A's didn't even lose to the Yankees in '01 because of payroll. They lost in a short series because of what Beane calls "fucking luck," or more specifically because Jeremy Giambi didn't slide into home plate. (OF course, this movie doesn't even have Jeremy Giambi on the team in 2001, but never mind.) Short series are much less subject to probability than a regular season, by definition (ie, small sample size). Thus Billy Beane's "shit doesn't work in the playoffs."

So he makes for a defective protagonist in this context, fixated on something that he can't apparently (at least during the course of the movie) thinks he can make happen with numbers.

And, yes, I do know that the Twins have little to nothing to do with the final result. I'm sorry they got so shortchanged, is what's going on here.

somebody who's a more hardcore sports fan than me should just go over the last 20 years and count how many times 'the best team' won. thinking it over college football might actually have the best record due to a *lack* of a playoff...

i'd have to see the data but i'd guess that basketball and football are pretty close in terms of talent decinding individual games - like last year's cavs were just not going to have a chance against last year's lakers (oh wait ^_^) - (maybe?) paradoxically, the nba & nfl have a higher level of parity

also college football kinda sucks

xp

that post should conclude with "so go figure"

where do those magical nfl players come from? do you think they just appear out of nowhere

anyway not gonna make the moneyball thread about college football, but if anyone has some nate silver-esque thing to link, I'd be interested

xp there's a reason rookies generally are not above-average players in the nfl

it's because they've just been spawned from giant pods iirc

soccer actually seems even worse than pro football on this measure. (only w/r/t the playoff championships, cause the game seems even less decisive than a pro football game?) and yet fluke teams don't seem to win that often, prob less than fluke teams win the super bowl?

Baseball was a lot higher on that chart when 2 teams made the "postseason," or even 4.

Eric, I don't think the Twins got shortchanged; the movie's not about them.

What Beane thinks he can make happen with numbers is winning his division, which you have to do first to win the World Series. Since winning the postseason is more independent of his regular-season strategy, he has less control of that. (Nobody can agree on a common strategy for winning the playoffs. They haven't found one.)

The v/o you hear after the Twins victory is, I'm pretty sure, an adaptation of what Joe Morgan, all-time great second baseman and nitwit analyst, said about why the Twins won -- "manufacturing runs," what's commonly known as "small ball." It might've been in that series where the boxscores ACTUALLY show that Minnesota won the way the A's usually did: getting on base frequently, hitting homers, etc.

Anyway, the reason this film has a "Story By" credit -- who is that guy? -- is that it's not Michael Lewis's.

re small ball aren't there stats that show that you have a better chance of scoring a run in any given inning w/ a runner on 1st and no outs than a runner on 2nd and one out?

there's only been like... 4 fluke winners in the last 30 super bowls

yeah fewer outs usually good xp

I believe 2nd and one out only increases your chances OVERALL of scoring JUST ONE run. This is why Weaver said he reserved bunts to advance "the run that will win the game."

xxp

btw was the black guy voiceover you hear at the end of this meant to be joe morgan?

Football seems to have less variance regardless of when the game is played - perhaps because of the short schedule, the best possible team (given injuries, etc.) being on the field, whereas in baseball you're only facing a team's best starter every fifth day and sometimes players will have a day off.

I think number of "possessions" is a big factor too, in which case basketball is way ahead. A single game has a pretty big sample.

I agree with the post above that said this movie was a little inert, but something about how low key it was really appealed to me, maybe just because I had a headache. I'll think more on why I liked the mood of it so much. I have a feeling it will wear well.

hoping to enjoy this on TNT in eight years

PTT: almost certainly, esp it followed an ESPN clip of Real Joe.

so Eric H and I are about 25% of the film critics writing in English who dislike this.

I'm mixed too. You're wrong about Pitt-Hill as a comedy duo, Morbs -- they don't socialize, exchange confidences, or have a drunken outing, thank god.

I know little about the facts (thank god too), but what's there gets a rather flat approach. Miller should have taken his cue from Pitt's quiet, self-mocking performance (I've waited a quarter of my life for the performances Pitt's given in the last three years).

agreed about pitt. though the fact that he was eating in every other scene made me think he was reprising his role from the oceans movies

thank God I know little about the Oceans movies.

They're a Sorkin-style comedy duo. I really hated that last "It's a metaphor" scene.

also Alfred, yer on the I Love Baseball board, so stfu

What, you taking your cue from Philip Seymour Hoffman?

My impression is that basketball has the most 'definitive' playoffs, it's very very hard for a bad team to beat an elite one in a 7-game series. IMO the baseball playoff structure is the worst in determining who the real best team is since the game has so much variance. Football is somewhere in between, good teams can beat bad ones but I don't think any team that wasn't a legit top 5 team can win 3 playoff games (whereas some of this decade's WS champions have been far from elite)