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She's pretty damn memorable even as-is, yeah. Certainly more memorable than Costner's character and about on par with Jones'. Partially it's the writing but I'm inclined to mostly chalk it up to Amy Madigan.
Yoda Reviews Baseball Movies
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More soon! I actually just got back from Pirates Fantasy Camp in Florida. An amazing experience that, between softball and all these reviews, probably makes this one of the more baseball-heavy years of my life. Still got some classic titles to get to, and should be able to have some more up soon with things relaxing over the holidays a bit.
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Note: I wrote some of this back when the film was released. I've edited some portions and added several others so that the tone fits the rest of reviews in this series.
In a sentence: The true story of Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane trying to field a contender with a meager payroll.
I have a friend named Mike. Mike is one of the sweetest people I know. I met him in a Sunday league a few years ago and liked him immediately. He was a team player in every sense: positive, encouraging, and he made a full effort on every play. And if you just walked by him you wouldn't necessarily guess he was any good, he just looked like a random middle-aged guy, struggling with his weight like so many others. But he was better than he looked. He could hit, he was faster than you expected, and he had a wonderful penchant for making diving stops and other really tough plays.
And that, I think, is one of the things I liked best about him: I liked that he was a secret. I liked that thoughtless people would look right past him, generalizing as people necessarily do. There are few things I like better on the teams I manage (2-3, at the moment) than finding hidden gems, people who are underappreciated for some facile reason or another. When I think about that, when I think about finding diamonds-for-the-diamond-in-the-rough, I think about Mike first.
My grandfather was a baseball scout. When I tell people this, they're tempted to assume this neatly explains my love for the game, but the truth is we weren't close, and aren't related by blood. I didn't even particularly like him. But it still seems fitting, somehow.
Nobody else in my family, other than my grandmother (his widow) loves baseball. None of them are even really sports fans at all. This is incredibly weird, especially in a big sports town like Pittsburgh. But it's probably contributed to my love of the game; not so much that I love it, but how. Because instead of sports (baseball in particular) being a thing I share with my loved ones, it's become a way for me to find new people to love. My only outlet for my love of the game is to form new friendships with other people who love it. I think I'd do this a lot less, and baseball/softball would be a much smaller part of my social life, if those kinds of connections preexisted within my family. But they don't. Baseball is where I found my chosen family, as the Millennials call it. The group you decide to love, as opposed to the ones that come preinstalled with your existence. In other words: your teammates.
Nothing changes until it does. And up until that point, it often seems like the universe itself has conspired to stop it from changing. But "there is nothing as powerful"—an old Victor Hugo quote goes—"as an idea whose time has come." Moneyball is about one of those ideas.
This is one of those films that is "based on a true story." And while "based on" is usually handwaving away tons of creative liberties, in this case the major beats are pretty accurate. Technically, it's based on a book of the same name which is about the true story of Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane (played here by Brad Pitt, whose physical metamorphosis into Robert Redford is nearly complete). In his youth Beane was a can't miss prospect who missed anyway, a fact which dovetails so well with his general managerial ethos that you'd swear it was one of the story's creative liberties, but it isn't.
Beane decided that the way baseball players were evaluated was fundamentally flawed. He believed that too much emphasis was placed on trivial things like how a player looked, or the amount of confidence they exhibited. That traditional baseball scouts were always looking at potential rather than reality, and thus gravitated towards archetypal players: handsome and statuesque, with a broad cross-section of skills that could each develop, rather than players who simply produced. And he was right.
Beane also decided that, even if you could get your personnel past such superficial things, the statistics used to evaluate a player's worth to the team were also flawed. He was right about this, too. The case study for this in both the book and the film is On Base Percentage, which is now widely understood to be a much better measure of a player's offensive contribution than the far more historically emphasized Batting Average. And if any of this sounds confusing, worry not: Assistant GM Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) will be your sabermetric sherpa throughout the film.
Oakland's necessity is the mother of Beane's inventions, because as the film opens a season-ending disappointment has been compounded by the departure of three high-profile free agents. Oakland is a small fish adrift in the ocean of baseball finances, so Beane is forced to find ways to do more with less. Beane exploits underutilized statistics like On Base Percentage and other strategic principles to attempt to replace these players for pennies on the dollar. He does this with discarded players plucked from baseball's scrap heap that he concludes are valuable, but not properly valued, leading to the superficially familiar tale of a rag-tag roster that shocks the experts and finds a way to win.
And win they do. This is a movie about sports, so I will not have spoiled your ability to enjoy it by informing you that the team ultimately exhibits some level of success, though to what extent I won't here divulge. The important thing is not their ultimate failure or success, but the struggle necessary to even attempt such a thing. New ideas do not merely have the burden of being better than the old ones: they must also be stronger than the accumulated psychic inertia of the old idea. New ideas may possess the truth, but the old ideas possess a formidable rolodex, and a perennial presence in the minds of an industry that buys them a lot of goodwill. Old ideas have entrenchments and bunkers and garrisons that must be sieged before the new idea can even come face to face with the old. The new idea must be arduously pushed to the top of the hill, but once there it rolls rapidly down the other side.
The film exhibits a deep authenticity; Pitt carries himself in precisely the way baseball people do. And being the grandson of a baseball scout, I can confirm that all the scouts herein are pretty much exactly like him: they have short hair, tanned skin, strawberry noses, and deep existential misgivings about computers.
Moneyball was adapted for the screen by Aaron Sorkin, who between this effort and The Social Network seems to be writing screenplays based on dares. Here again he's taken an ostensibly boring topic and made it entertaining. Largely stripped from the film is his famed reliance on characters walking and talking ("pedeconferencing," as it's come to be known), but we get a fun variation of it in a scene set during Major League Baseball's trading deadline, where Pitt's character makes a series of interconnected phone calls that resembles nothing so much as a waltz.
Regardless of what happened on the field, the ideas depicted in this film have won out so overwhelmingly that Beane and his ilk have had to move on to new methods of evaluating talent because the ones depicted here have already become the new conventional wisdom. Moneyball is not about baseball, or even about money. It's about the difficulty of change and the often damaged people that are the only ones willing to lead the charge through the brick wall. It's about the perceived impossibility of reform right up until the moment that it suddenly becomes inevitable. People struggle and fight and kick and scream and gnash and nothing happens. Nothing changes.
Until it does.
Mike expressed a lot of excitement and gratitude when I asked him to play for us. And he's kept expressing it since. Over and over each year he'd tell me all over again how happy he was to play for us, how grateful he was for the opportunity, how appreciative he was to feel like he belonged somewhere.
At first I just chalked this up to him being a positive, happy guy, and that's part of it. But just this past fall, after years of playing together, he explained: he spent his childhood bouncing around from one foster home to another. He never felt like he belonged anywhere. That's why it means so much to him. That's why he plays the way he does.
Moneyball (2011)
In a sentence: The true story of Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane trying to field a contender with a meager payroll.
I have a friend named Mike. Mike is one of the sweetest people I know. I met him in a Sunday league a few years ago and liked him immediately. He was a team player in every sense: positive, encouraging, and he made a full effort on every play. And if you just walked by him you wouldn't necessarily guess he was any good, he just looked like a random middle-aged guy, struggling with his weight like so many others. But he was better than he looked. He could hit, he was faster than you expected, and he had a wonderful penchant for making diving stops and other really tough plays.
And that, I think, is one of the things I liked best about him: I liked that he was a secret. I liked that thoughtless people would look right past him, generalizing as people necessarily do. There are few things I like better on the teams I manage (2-3, at the moment) than finding hidden gems, people who are underappreciated for some facile reason or another. When I think about that, when I think about finding diamonds-for-the-diamond-in-the-rough, I think about Mike first.
My grandfather was a baseball scout. When I tell people this, they're tempted to assume this neatly explains my love for the game, but the truth is we weren't close, and aren't related by blood. I didn't even particularly like him. But it still seems fitting, somehow.
Nobody else in my family, other than my grandmother (his widow) loves baseball. None of them are even really sports fans at all. This is incredibly weird, especially in a big sports town like Pittsburgh. But it's probably contributed to my love of the game; not so much that I love it, but how. Because instead of sports (baseball in particular) being a thing I share with my loved ones, it's become a way for me to find new people to love. My only outlet for my love of the game is to form new friendships with other people who love it. I think I'd do this a lot less, and baseball/softball would be a much smaller part of my social life, if those kinds of connections preexisted within my family. But they don't. Baseball is where I found my chosen family, as the Millennials call it. The group you decide to love, as opposed to the ones that come preinstalled with your existence. In other words: your teammates.
Nothing changes until it does. And up until that point, it often seems like the universe itself has conspired to stop it from changing. But "there is nothing as powerful"—an old Victor Hugo quote goes—"as an idea whose time has come." Moneyball is about one of those ideas.
This is one of those films that is "based on a true story." And while "based on" is usually handwaving away tons of creative liberties, in this case the major beats are pretty accurate. Technically, it's based on a book of the same name which is about the true story of Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane (played here by Brad Pitt, whose physical metamorphosis into Robert Redford is nearly complete). In his youth Beane was a can't miss prospect who missed anyway, a fact which dovetails so well with his general managerial ethos that you'd swear it was one of the story's creative liberties, but it isn't.
Beane decided that the way baseball players were evaluated was fundamentally flawed. He believed that too much emphasis was placed on trivial things like how a player looked, or the amount of confidence they exhibited. That traditional baseball scouts were always looking at potential rather than reality, and thus gravitated towards archetypal players: handsome and statuesque, with a broad cross-section of skills that could each develop, rather than players who simply produced. And he was right.
Beane also decided that, even if you could get your personnel past such superficial things, the statistics used to evaluate a player's worth to the team were also flawed. He was right about this, too. The case study for this in both the book and the film is On Base Percentage, which is now widely understood to be a much better measure of a player's offensive contribution than the far more historically emphasized Batting Average. And if any of this sounds confusing, worry not: Assistant GM Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) will be your sabermetric sherpa throughout the film.
Oakland's necessity is the mother of Beane's inventions, because as the film opens a season-ending disappointment has been compounded by the departure of three high-profile free agents. Oakland is a small fish adrift in the ocean of baseball finances, so Beane is forced to find ways to do more with less. Beane exploits underutilized statistics like On Base Percentage and other strategic principles to attempt to replace these players for pennies on the dollar. He does this with discarded players plucked from baseball's scrap heap that he concludes are valuable, but not properly valued, leading to the superficially familiar tale of a rag-tag roster that shocks the experts and finds a way to win.
And win they do. This is a movie about sports, so I will not have spoiled your ability to enjoy it by informing you that the team ultimately exhibits some level of success, though to what extent I won't here divulge. The important thing is not their ultimate failure or success, but the struggle necessary to even attempt such a thing. New ideas do not merely have the burden of being better than the old ones: they must also be stronger than the accumulated psychic inertia of the old idea. New ideas may possess the truth, but the old ideas possess a formidable rolodex, and a perennial presence in the minds of an industry that buys them a lot of goodwill. Old ideas have entrenchments and bunkers and garrisons that must be sieged before the new idea can even come face to face with the old. The new idea must be arduously pushed to the top of the hill, but once there it rolls rapidly down the other side.
The film exhibits a deep authenticity; Pitt carries himself in precisely the way baseball people do. And being the grandson of a baseball scout, I can confirm that all the scouts herein are pretty much exactly like him: they have short hair, tanned skin, strawberry noses, and deep existential misgivings about computers.
Moneyball was adapted for the screen by Aaron Sorkin, who between this effort and The Social Network seems to be writing screenplays based on dares. Here again he's taken an ostensibly boring topic and made it entertaining. Largely stripped from the film is his famed reliance on characters walking and talking ("pedeconferencing," as it's come to be known), but we get a fun variation of it in a scene set during Major League Baseball's trading deadline, where Pitt's character makes a series of interconnected phone calls that resembles nothing so much as a waltz.
Regardless of what happened on the field, the ideas depicted in this film have won out so overwhelmingly that Beane and his ilk have had to move on to new methods of evaluating talent because the ones depicted here have already become the new conventional wisdom. Moneyball is not about baseball, or even about money. It's about the difficulty of change and the often damaged people that are the only ones willing to lead the charge through the brick wall. It's about the perceived impossibility of reform right up until the moment that it suddenly becomes inevitable. People struggle and fight and kick and scream and gnash and nothing happens. Nothing changes.
Until it does.
Mike expressed a lot of excitement and gratitude when I asked him to play for us. And he's kept expressing it since. Over and over each year he'd tell me all over again how happy he was to play for us, how grateful he was for the opportunity, how appreciative he was to feel like he belonged somewhere.
At first I just chalked this up to him being a positive, happy guy, and that's part of it. But just this past fall, after years of playing together, he explained: he spent his childhood bouncing around from one foster home to another. He never felt like he belonged anywhere. That's why it means so much to him. That's why he plays the way he does.
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Ah, I see the recommendations are afoot. So with the Musical Countdown in progress, I hope to see a review of Damn Yankees (1958). I'm not a baseball fan but I loved the look at the old stadiums, now long gone. Fun movie and it qualifies for the countdown.
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If you're looking for a good baseball movie that rarely gets talked about, check out Bang the Drum Slowly (1973) starring Michael Moriarty and Robert De Niro, (before De Niro was famous).
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This is my official request for a review of Trouble with the Curve 
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You rated this higher than Bull Durham?
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