Moneyball

[metirish]

Happened upon it last night and watched it again, I do enjoy it, although very little mention of the great starting pitching they had , of course this is something many people note about it.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

He's got an ugly girlfriend

[Edgy MD]

An odd film in that it deserves every bit of criticism it gets (see the pitching issue above) and yet it's hard to feel uncharitable toward it. Even thought they get some real-life stuff wrong, and some baseball wrong, it feels like real-life baseball.

I'm just a little bit caught in the middle. Life is a maze, and love is a riddle

[dgwphotography]

I always have trouble getting past fat Art Howe...

[Edgy MD]

There's certainly that. And while Met fans have few good memories of Howe or his era, even beyond the gut, Hoffman's character doesn't really resemble Art at all. Somebody decided it would be fun to get an aged Yogi Berra to do film reviews, and one of the first things he pointed out was how they got Howe wrong.

Also, it would have been hard to nod to reality without it becoming a distraction, but the story begins at the end of the 2001 season, and covers the delayed-starting 2002 season, but makes no mention of or not to 9/11.

[Frayed Knot]

It didn't cover the growing troubles in Iraq either, but maybe because that's not what the movie was about.

I don't have a problem with most of the 'problems' often cited in this flick.
Sure the A's had other good players, specifically starting pitching. But the focus is that, after coming off a 102 win season, they lost three top FAs to high budget clubs
via offers with which they couldn't possibly come close to matching due to baseball's financial structure. So forced to think out of the box and shop at the island for misfit
toys, they adopted strategies that were mocked both in-house and by much of established baseball. The result was a season with 103 wins including a record 20 straight.
Then, when that club also failed to advance in the post-season, the choruses of 'See, I told ya so' dogged them anyway, at least until the lifeline thrown by Boston's
John Henry signals maybe the beginning of acceptance.

That PSH playing Art Howe didn't look enough like Art Howe? That a movie which (briefly) opens some 5-6 weeks after 9/11 and takes place mostly 6-12 months
later doesn't mention 9/11? That the players focused on were mostly just the old ones going out and the new ones coming in? Ffffft, all non-issues for me.

The biggest baseball mistake I can find is that Jeremy Giambi was on the 2001 team rather than being added during the '01/'02 off-season as shown.
Other than that, Play Ball!

[Edgy MD]

It didn't cover the growing troubles in Iraq either, but maybe because that's not what the movie was about.

Well, yes, but I mean the delayed opening to the season the patriotic pimping out of the uniforms and stadiums. It was an unavoidable and constant element in baseball.

Chad Bradford also played with the team the previous season.

What deserves a movie treatment from the 2001 post-season is Jeter's shovel pass play. Almost none of it makes any sense.

[Frayed Knot]

Like maybe the script could have had Beane and Shapiro talking politics while discussing potential trades for LH relievers.
S. Shapiro: It's really getting crazy these days
Beane: 'Tell me about it. I was just reading this fan site called the MoFo where some guys were demanding dead Arabs in the streets of NYC'


And what delayed opening?
The 2002 season started on April 1st

[Edgy MD]

No, I am certainly not suggesting scenes should be there, only the notion of, as in the case of Art Howe, getting character right, whether that be a person or the character of the season.

I thought I remembered a spring training delay. If I'm wrong, shame on me.

[batmagadanleadoff]

I'm totally with FK here. They're trying to make a tight two hour movie, like always. If the story could be told without the 9/11 tragedy, it should. The Chad Bradford factual alteration makes perfect sense from a movie storytelling perspective because Bradford epitomizes the sabermetrics philosophy adopted by the A's: the unorthodox looking pitcher who is nevertheless, extremely effective stat-wise. So the scriptwriters had Oakland acquire Bradford for 2002 to better demonstrate the A's philosophy shift.

Very few true story movies are 100% accurate. I watched Bohemian Rhapsody last week and Queen was performing Fat Bottomed Girls years before the song was actually written. This week I saw Black Mass, which absolves practically the whole Boston FBI other than two agents, of complicity in the Bulger scandal and ignores entirely that rogue agent Connoly was also on the take. Makes you wonder what Connoly's motivation was. Moneyball is about 20 years old and I've never heard anybody mention the missing 9/11 angle. It would've needlessly cluttered the movie.

[metirish]

I thought the scenes with Art Howe lit up the room

[Edgy MD]

I'm totally with FK here. They're trying to make a tight two hour movie, like always. If the story could be told without the 9/11 tragedy, it should. The Chad Bradford factual alteration makes perfect sense from a movie storytelling perspective because Bradford epitomizes the sabermetrics philosophy adopted by the A's: the unorthodox looking pitcher who is nevertheless, extremely effective stat-wise. So the scriptwriters had Oakland acquire Bradford for 2002 to better demonstrate the A's philosophy shift.

Very few true story movies are 100% accurate. I watched Bohemian Rhapsody last week and Queen was performing Fat Bottomed Girls years before the song was actually written. This week I saw Black Mass, which absolves practically the whole Boston FBI other than two agents, of complicity in the Bulger scandal and ignores entirely that rogue agent Connoly was also on the take. Makes you wonder what Connoly's motivation was. Moneyball is about 20 years old and I've never heard anybody mention the missing 9/11 angle. It would've needlessly cluttered the movie.

I've frankly never mentioned it. It's hardly what I would first mention, but most of my other quibbles, have already come up in this space, so I included something else. Here's a new one: Billy Beane's second wife and their twins are also blasted from existence, presenting his occasional bonding with his daughter Casey as the one meaningful thread in his existentially empty non-baseball life.

I guess what makes a sports film different than some of these other liberties is that much of the history they are changing is history that much of the audience has vividly witnessed, can easily look up in the statistical record, or watch on video, and so the changes undermine the authenticity more deeply.

That wouldn't apply to Billy Beane's second family, but it would apply to many of the baseball personalities. And it also applies to any actual Queen fans who know the timeline on when the songs appeared and the performances (Live Aid relative to his AIDS diagnosis) took place.

The biggest thing that bothered me was that we really get an utterly fictional version of Art Howe, and anybody who has watched the guy over the previous 40 (now 50) years in baseball knows it. But that's nothing new.

[Fman99]

I couldn't tell you how bored I was by this movie. In real life all of these guys were much more nerdy and unlaid (well, maybe not Art Howe, but the rest of them).

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

I like the movie. In defense of the historic goofs, it wasn't made for baseball fans, as much as it as made for Brad Pitt fans who wouldn't know the difference.

[Frayed Knot]

The biggest thing that bothered me was that we really get an utterly fictional version of Art Howe, and anybody who has watched the guy over the previous 40 (now 50) years in baseball knows it. But that's nothing new.

Howe, who i recall being not a big presence in the book (but its been a while), is portrayed in the flick as generally grumpy and not at all in line with Beane's direction for the club.

Was he actually grumpy? Not that I know of (we heard, after all, that he lit up rooms) but of course I have no idea what he was like behind the scenes. Maybe behind closed doors he did nothing but bitch and moan about his contract as well as interference from above.
In line with his GM? Most probably not and, in any case, was chosen by screenwriters to represent one of the doubters within the A's org that our heroes Billy and Petey have to win over or push out of the way.

So you could say it's more a symbolic portrayal than a personal one. And while I can understand why that bothers Art, it doesn't particularly bother me as a viewer.