Moneyball

that was for the crack of the bat! crowd noise!

uggh i keep forgetting how they stretched it to 9 or 10 picture noms instead of 5. pisses me off.

hey sanskrit

i don't think it's that strange. Moneyball did have kind of a weird sound atmosphere around it. Large chunks of silence, lots of strange breaks in action - not sure if that should get a nom but what does?

"action"

same level of thinking that got Fight Club nominated only for... sound effects editing

skrit, if it had been 5 nominees two of the 3 films that don't stink would've been left off.

When they run through the list of player names near the beginning, I saw Matt Cain - Giants. He wasn't drafted until the next summer. GET IT RIGHT, HOLLYWOOD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4WBv2f8XWU

In retrospect, I think I might have enjoyed this movie if it had been a German film.

"When they run through the list of player names near the beginning, I saw Matt Cain - Giants. He wasn't drafted until the next summer. GET IT RIGHT, HOLLYWOOD"

He was in the infamous Moneyball draft wasn't he? He went right after Blanton, I think.

Those early scenes were from the winter/spring before the 2002 season, though.

OK so explain me why it makes any sense to make these dudes train for a position they have no obvious experience/skill at playing.

Maybe this is clearer in the book but in the movie it totally went over my head.

converting catchers to 1st isnt that uncommon, if you're talking about hatteberg

I am. I don't watch baseball so I don't know.

Because it isn't that difficult. There are countless examples of players who have switched positions successfully.

There are some players who never adjust to how fast the ball comes at them, but for the most part any guy who is an athletic catcher tends to perform pretty well when they move to the infield. Craig Biggio and Brandon Inge both played well in the infield after a position switch.

And then there are utility guys who play as many as seven positions, but obviously there was a point in their career when they were focused on one position and learned new skills.

Hatteberg was sort of a special example because he wasn't used to the velocity and unpredictability of batted balls, but eventually he became an above average defender at first.

But the larger idea is that Beane et al. believed that defense was overvalued or hard to measure. That has changed since the book was written, as he has subsequently tried to target defense as an undervalued resource.

OK but why sign this guy in the first place? I'm sure there's something totally elementary I'm not getting

because he was a good player that other teams didnt see any value in. thats the point of the movie!

yeah yeah but a good player at another position, right?

At catcher, yes.

He couldn't catch anymore because he suffered an injury that made it tough for him to throw to second, but the first baseman doesn't have to make throws like that for the most part.

1st base is one of the least demanding positions to field, aside from the fact that you get a shitload of balls your way. its usually where you switch a guy to if he has a good bat but is having trouble fielding his current position.

Ah ok I see, thanks!

And they were paying him only 900k, whereas every other 1B in the league who outperformed him made significantly more money, so he provided great financial value.

What is the average age at which baseball players retire? Assuming it isn't as different by position as it is in "soccer", i.e. goalkeepers playing into their 40s, etc

i dont know what the actual age is, but pitchers seem to age the best with a fair number of them playing into their 40s.

fair amount /= average imho. average MLB career has got to be something like 2-3 years right? pulled that outta my ass, lolgtfo.

hatteburg had never played 1B in his life, but beane didn't care. the film/book tries to elevate this as drama: "I DON'T CARE IF YOU'VE NEVER PLAYED 1B, WHAT MATTERS IS THAT YOU CAN GET ON BASE AND YOU ARE CHEAP." In economics, this is called exploiting market inefficiencies. In essence that's what Moneyball the film tries to do: "we only have this much money so we have to get creative in order to win games."

thanks you guys,
peter grasswich
a/k/a "queequeg" or "peter g."

hi

why it makes any sense to make these dudes train for a position they have no obvious experience/skill at playing.

On an individual basis, defense is less important than offense. Casey Stengel, regarded as one of the greatest managers, played guys "out of position" ALL THE TIME. There are loads of guys with bad gloves in the Hall of Fame; bad bats, very few.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/video-essay-moneyball-and-ways-of-seeing-presented-by-seventh-art#

It's kind of a terrible video fwiw.

Finally caught it on cable. Pretty lousy.

*glances at picture of one of his Little League teams*

A's working on sequel!

I thought the movie was absolutely fucking awful. Blind Side was a pile of shit, too.

u know Michael Lewis had nothing to do w/ the movies

No one said he did

‏@D_Train35
Man they might have to make MONEYBALL 2 the way A's are playing right now. #oaktown

hope it's better than the bad news bears go to japan

Just saw this. Jonah Hill was awful, he detracts from the movie. The side plot with Beane and his daughter didn't work at at all, I guess Hollywood norms dictate that you should have a precocious child to counterbalance a brooding, complex lead character. Otherwise, this wasn't bad, especially for an insider baseball film produced for a general movie audience,

Nate Silver Verified
‏@fivethirtyeight
My sh*t doesn't work in the fantasy football playoffs.

Just watched. Really annoyed with the Rincon scene where Beane/Jonah Hill dismiss the Giants and specifically mentions JT Snow (2002 OBP .344), Kent (.368), and some other guy (.582 lol).

2lazy2google:

Has Beane ever spoken about PEDs at length?

Re-signing Bartolo Colon after his 50 game suspension kinda said it all.

not really

http://www.sfgate.com/sports/article/A-s-exec-GM-Farhan-Zaidi-takes-old-and-5205023.php

Zaidi wowed Beane and Forst. A 2 1/2-inch binder full of projections for the 2005 A's didn't hurt, nor did Zaidi's affinity for Oasis, a British band that Beane also likes. Zaidi had been embarrassed to list "Britpop" as an interest on his resume, but it wound up helping seal the deal.

"David and I looked at each other when he left and said, 'That's the guy,' " Beane said. "It wasn't just his analytical skills, it was his incredible personality. It was important to us to find someone to fit into a very fraternal group."

Chemistry! RIP, Moneyball.

what other front-office metrics do you have?

(Jokes.)

Some customers, of course, maybe 15-20% of them, loved the competitive chutzpah it took for Beane to trade his best player. For them, winning is all that matters.

Others, such as the author of this essay, were appalled. We other 80-85%, perhaps we are evolutionary dead ends, the kind of people who let our emotions get in the way of us pulling the trigger. Perhaps we are the kind of people who, in the end, will lose, and thus fail to pass on our genes to the generations of people 200 million years from now. We are freeloaders, parasites feeding off the efforts of the 15-20% of the population who actually accomplish something.

So be it. I am what evolution has produced to this point, a person who does not believe that winning is the highest value. These emotions that group-level selection has instilled in me–the feelings of loyalty, betrayal, belonging, loneliness, embarrassment, forgiveness, shame, remorse, gratitude, sympathy, rejection, acceptance that drive us to compete in groups and for groups–these are the things that drive me to be an Oakland Athletics customer. I value these things more than winning itself. For if I didn’t, it would be very easy to just cross the bay and join hands with the team that has won three of the last five World Series, the team that has actually won, the San Francisco Giants....

http://ken.arneson.name/2014/12/the-long-long-history-of-why-i-do-not-like-the-josh-donaldson-trade/

That is a seriously long history.

i thought the first 4/5ths was excellent and then it collapsed into a prolonged reddit aspie rant when he should connected his master argument together.

In 2002, A's general manager Billy Beane crafted a new kind of major league baseball draft class. For the next 12 years, Tabitha Soren, who is married to Michael Lewis, followed the class made famous by Moneyball, chronicling with her camera the vagaries of the players' lives on and off the field. These are 10 of those players, from 2002 to 2014.

http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/12347245/faces-revolution