Money Ball the movie

I thought it was a nice touch that the movie used a Joe Morgan voice imitator for the radio interviews/announcer/etc. voice of anti-Moneyballness. I'm sure that Joe Morgan is not planning to see the movie Billy Beane wrote and directed about himself.

 

Embarrassing article. The writer seems to confuse a film with a documentary.

 

What's so bad about a film getting the facts right?

Nothing wrong with a longtime baseball writer taking 12 inches to list a few inaccuracies so that moviegoers such as JayFarrar don't think the soda-machine scene actually happened.

 

What's so difficult about a longtime baseball writer trying to understand the difference between a work of non-fiction and a movie BASED on the book? The two are entirely different media

The fact that the soda scene never happened is irrelevant to the movie.

There are numerous films based on either works of non fiction or historical incidents that don't get all the "facts" right. That's why movies says they're "based on" or "inspired by" the book or incident.

 

Of course. And there are numerous articles about said films that clarify the differences. Hell, ESPN.com had an entire running feature based on that concept for about a decade.

 

Joey Giardello sued the makers of "The Hurricane" and won an acknowledgement that in truth he beat Rubin Carter handily. And if I had a nickel for every time I heard "Remember the Titans" was "all true" ...

 

There's utterly nothing wrong with fact-checking a movie. Let the reader/viewer decide if it's meaningless or a howler.

 

I went and saw the movie with a bunch if non baseball fans and the first thing they asked me was to tell them what was true and what wasn't. I think people are curious.

I absolutely think they changed a lot of the story.

And I absolutely think they had to do that to make it a good movie.

 

Not trying to start shit here, but is JR not one of the most demonstrative posters when something's wrong? If someone made a movie "based on" a book about John A. MacDonald's life and had him with four kids and starting his reign (?) four years later than he did and making him sober, he'd be shitting all over the product.

 

Not sure what you mean.

In "Field of Dreams", Shoeless Joe Jackson bats right instead of left.

Does that change the basic quality of the film?

Well, other than it was a fucking awful movie, maybe not

 

And they'd be wrong and yes, I'd shit all over them because Sir John A had one child and was a drunk.

However, if the movie had Sir John A drinking at a bar in Ottawa having a conversation with George Brown when in fact he had that conversation in a bar in Kingston, I wouldn't give a shit.

Big difference.

 

Right. But her article points out that he went to a player's house (GMs don't), they traded for players that were already on the team by that point, and that the way his partner joined the team wasn't right either.

It's not just the soda. Saying they got Giambi for the 2002 season when he was out on one of the most memorable plays of the 2001 postseason? Worth mentioning.