Money Ball the movie

By the way, I disagree with Slusser that GMs don't ever visit a player's home before signing him. (Although it's certainly not common.)

The Braves' top brass went to Billy Wagner's farm in Virginia a couple years ago to persuade him to sign.

http://www.ajc.com/sports/atlanta-braves/wagner-is-braves-new-230957.html

EDIT: And, of course, there's the famous Thanksgiving dinner at Curt Schilling's house in 2003 ... with houseguest Theo Epstein.

 

Typical of the Disney-like allergy to facts that picture reflected.

Just desserts: Thing didn't even gross $10 million, and it cost 'em $40 mill to make.

 

This is just what happens with movies based on true stories. We can argue about the practice as a whole, I guess, but that ship has sailed a long time ago. This same discussion flared up last year over "The King's Speech."

 

Another example with ESPN: The Junction Boys (ducking).

The movie portrayed the team as getting the crap beat out of them as a good thing, because they eventually became a championship team. What they pretty much ignored was that the team was so beaten up, they won just one game that year, and didn't win the title until two years later, and only a handful of the Junction players were on that team.

 

What if they made a Moneyball movie about the Yankees?

Worth a chuckle.

http://www.jest.com/video/46873/too-much-moneyball

 

That was pretty good.

I'd go see it if they cast Dania Ramirez as A-Rod.

 

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/09/the-many-problems-with-moneyball/245769/1/

 

On what planet is San Francisco a "small market"?

 

Where does it say that?

Linking Oakland with San Francisco to strengthen the argument is a joke. It's like letting the red-headed stepchild dress up and be part of the family picture.

 

Early in the piece.

I agree with a lot of the rest of it. As we've talked about on here a lot, authors like Lewis and Gladwell tend to cherry-pick facts to fit their narrative.

That said, guys like Mulder, Hudson, Zito, Tejada, and Chavez are the kind of players whose value anyone would recognize. The "Moneyball" strategy was putting value on the field in the margins - the 2 percent principle, as the book on the Rays calls it, I believe.

Of course, Lewis doesn't frame it that way. He instead largely goes overboard and dismisses the contributions of some of those others and pins it all on Chad Bradford and Scott Hatteberg, or so a baseball novice would believe when they read the book.

 

I am surprised succeeding edition(s) of the book haven't addressed the sagging parts of the narrative.

His editors failed him the first time around by not telling him how thin it was. Or maybe Lewis just doesn't know a lot about baseball to begin with.

 

His editors didn't fail him whatsoever. It's the best-selling sports book of all time, by a country mile. It was a runaway best seller. It may have just been turned into a "Best Picture" Academy Award winner and certainly a nominee.

He wasn't writing an academic paper. He was telling a story.