Money Ball the movie

Wasn't the stuff about Beane's temper and his reasoning for getting rid of Giambi taken right from the book?

 

It's entirely reasonable to think the players in some organization pay for their own pop. When I interned for a rookie league team that had a major league affiliate, the players there had to pay for soda, too

 

That happened when T.J. Houshmandzadeh (sad captive of the Bengals for eight years) went to Seattle for his free agent visit. He went to put money in the machine and they asked him what the hell he was doing.

 

It very well might have been. It's been eight years since I've read it. I'll have to go back and re-read. Still, I'm sure the book provided some context for it that explained why it fit into his character, otherwise cold and calculating. I'm not sure the movie accomplished that.

 

It's not so much the "fat" as it was the "unathletic" stereotype that DePodesta objected to, I think.

I mean, the real DePodesta was a Division I football and baseball player, not some clumsy dork who can't even catch a ball tossed to him. So Jonah Hill, whether pre- or post-weight loss, is a pretty poor casting decision from that perspective. (But I saw the movie tonight, and he was a fantastic casting decision for "Peter Brand", though. Great portrayal of the essence of the DePodesta/Epstein/Hoyer types ... just purely fictional as the real DePodesta, that's all. So it's probably a good thing that "Brand" merely represents the new-wave statheads, rather than depicting a real person when it's so far off-base from real life.)

That said, DePodesta certainly didn't opt out when The Daily Show's Demetri Martin was set to play his character. Because he actually met with Hill about the script and reportedly had some good meetings with him before requesting that his name not be used.

I think he was OK with being portrayed as a computer nerd by Martin ... but Hill (partly because of his weight, yes) added a strong dimension of "has never even stepped on a field", and that's completely inaccurate.

 

Right now on Turner Classic Movies is the all-time unsteroid-aided record flick for baseball history revisionism, making whatever happened "Moneyball" small beer. I refer to that 1952 epic "The Winning Team," with Ronald Reagan as Grover Cleveland Alexander. The script dealt with the fact that Alexander was a serious alcoholic by saying he was suffering the effects of having been gassed in the trenches in WW1. Topping this, it has the Cardinals skipper Rogers Hornsby finding Alex laboring at rock bottom in a carny sideshow game, then finding redemption in the 1926 World Series, rather than the prosaic reality the Cards got him in a trade with the Cubs.
Also, then fringe major leaguer Gene Mauch got to strike in the movie playing I think Tony Lazzeri.

 

I see "The Winning Team," and raise you "Fear Strikes Out."

A must-watch for any sportswriter anthropologist looking to discern patterns of postwar masculine identity confusion.

 

Also worth watching for Anthony Perkins' throwing motion.

 

Interesting look at Billy Beane's future...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/magazine/for-billy-beane-winning-isnt-everything.html?ref=magazine

MINOR SPOILERS BELOW...

I enjoyed the movie, but I kept getting hung up on the anachronisms and odd casting choices -- Art Howe, one of the leanest managers in baseball, portrayed with a pot belly? Texting and Net-suite Stadium in 2002? But as my wife likes to tell me, "Honey, it's not a documentary."

But I thought the movie also gives short shrift to the other key reason the A's were successful in 2002 -- Hudson and Co.

And, it was a tad slow ... I could have gone with one or two fewer loving shots of Pitt just thinking.

 

My wife mentioned the texting. I brought up the North Face jackets. Got to watch that stuff in the post-"Mad Men" era.

The Hudson-Mulder-Zito thing didn't bother me as much as it did in the book. I thought it was handled well. They were quite clear that they were replacing offensive production. At one point, Peter Brand says something along the lines of, "We're projected to surrender 645 runs. We need to score 841 in order to win 99 games and get into the playoffs." They acknowledged that the pitching was strong. I didn't need the exposition that some seem to want - perhaps a Brad Pitt soliloquy about Sandy Alderson's drafting prowess? - though I thought it was needed in the meatier book version of the story.

You can see Hudson, Mulder, and Zito's names a few times on dry erase boards and computer printouts and such during the movie. I don't think they were misleadingly kept out. I think that they were extraneous to the story that was being told - replacing two All-Stars in the lineup without increasing the payroll.

 

SPOILER ALERT:










I also thought the daughter subplot was extraneous. It was definitely contrived to give us the ending - him putting the CD in the car as he drove away and made his decision. But I thought that Hill showing him the Jeremy Brown video was more than enough to get him to that point. The daughter CD was a case of the screen writer not trusting the audience to get the point the first time around, so he had to pound it into our skulls even further. You could have cut 10-15 minutes out of the movie, improved its accuracy, and not given us a false denouement if you just, say, had "Homeward Bound" come on the radio as he was driving away, then went to black with the same words across the screen. The Brand-Beane relationship was the one that mattered in the movie. Why didn't the writer-director team trust it enough? Why did they feel compelled to add a daughter, too? That watered down the great moment where Brand convinces Beane to stay in Oakland.

 

I have a feeling the baseball stuff is going to make me cringe. Going to a matinee tomorrow.

I agree with DePodesta that having a stranger portray you is fraught with all kinds of complications and disappointments. I don't think you could ever truly be satisfied with the portrayal or with the person who's doing it, and if the person doing it is a tool, that's got to be pretty jarring, also.