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Baseball Primer Newsblog — The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand Sunday, January 15, 2012On DVD: Moneyball’s deleted scenes reveal the numbers game
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Posted: January 15, 2012 at 10:44 AM | 33 comment(s)
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1. Rally Posted: January 15, 2012 at 10:56 AM (#4037327)Yeah that made me cringe a bit. Bradfords OPS against in his career against lefties is .856 compared to .585 against righties.
Moneyball kind of made Beane seem like he didn't know much about baseball. In the movie Jonah Hill basically teaches him what makes a good baseball player.
While it was lame on a baseball level, it was OK for the flow of the movie, but I agree with the cutting of the scene.
The diminution of the Bradford and Hatteberg stories so the director could show extended footage of Pitt driving a truck in circles is the biggest failure of the film in my mind.
Or, it demonstrates that you weren't the director's target audience. The movie isn't a filmed version of the book, any more than the book is an objective analysis of the management of the Oakland A's.
It's awards season.
I think Hatteberg was covered fine. We got a scene introducing him as the main "misfit toy", a scene with his wife showing the uncertainty in his life following his injury, him learning his new position, not to mention the two funniest moments in the movie are both Hatteberg related ("Tell 'em Wash" and "What's your biggest fear?")
I think that's plenty of coverage for guy the movie isn't about. (Whether or not the book was, the movie was explicitly about Billy Beane the person)
I do think more Bradford could have helped the story though.
EDIT: and forgot, I believe Hatteberg has an important hit at some point. Not to mention (while off he's off camera for most of it) he's the focus of the long-running Pena/Hatteberg dispute between Beane and Howe. Really, how much more Hatteberg do you want?
There's a truck driving in circles demographic?
July 29 vs. Cle: Lee Stevens, 7th, 2 on
Magnante was horrible but ... he came on in the 7th with no outs, inheriting 2 runners and a 6-3 lead from Hudson. He gave up 2 hits (including that HR) and a BB to make it 8-6 Cleveland.
However, he faced:
Thome, LHB with significant split
Bradley, Both
Stevens, LHB with a moderate split
You would have to be batshit insane to bring in Bradford to face those guys.
Bradford did come on to pitch 1.2 innings giving up one hit. They lifted him so Micah Bowie could pitch to Thome. :-)
That was the last time Magnante ever pitched in the majors.
As odd as it sounds audiences in general are more into tortorous self-doubt in a moving vehicle (see Maguire, Jerry) than the details of running a baseball team.
If the GM were selling marshmallows, the answer is "not too well".
I wonder how many World Series rings Art Howe has. Just wondering.
Yes. Camping World Truck Series
I rented the movie Friday, and liked it a lot. My wife liked it as much as I did, though she's not a baseball fan.
Could get ugly. Durocher went ballistic when Larry McPhail just sent him a note.
Zero thanks to Don Denkinger.
One of the oddest scenes in the movie for me was when Beane chewed out Giambi for dancing after a loss and while Jeremy got off the table he continued to subtlely and rythmically thrust his pelvis in Beane's direction with a defiant grin on his face for the duration of the tirade.
Even more exciting is Extreme Motorhome Racing
The actual race starts around 3:45 if you're not into the usual Top Gear shenanigans.
Or, it demonstrates they ignored a wealth of great source material to make a mediocre film. It's not about adherence to the book, which is unfilmable as is, it's about missing the most interesting stories and people from the book.
Chad Bradford's story is amazing, and none of it is in the film.
Hattebergs story is equally as gripping, and only the palest shadow of it remains in the film. They preferred to show cringeworthy truck donut scenes to Wash exhorting a self doubting Hatteberg as he drilled him with grounders, or better showing the audience how down Hatteberg was and how desperate his situation was. That adds a much more human face to the consequences of Beane's decisions than Pitt being pensive.
Beane's back story is integral to Lewis's thesis of who he is, and it's also a great story, and it pretty much doesn't exist in the film.
They invented and actually tediously showed the backstory for the Depodesta character just to give Beane a foil, which is an amazing waste of film time for so little it added. Jonah Hill could be a great foil to Brad Pitt if he just wandered into scenes.
I'm not saying integrating the story lines of multiple compelling characters while still making a compelling film is easy, it's difficult. But when it's done right you have something that will be remembered a lot longer than this mediocrity will.
It's not that they lacked for brilliant writers. But for some reason they took the easy way out and hung what they could on a standard Hollywood cliche of a plot. It could be that Brad Pitt demanded the film be utterly focused on his character, but given his history that's extremely unlikely.
What is almost certain is the producers didn't want to take any risks with the material, they just wanted to crap out a film on relatively cheap budget and make a low risk profit leveraging Brad Pitt and the extra publicity they'd get using the Moneyball name.
I wasn't too interested in seeing the movie since I didn't think they could really do that much with the source material without either insulting baseball fans (to dumb it down) or boring everyone else (by explaining too much). Then my wife said she wanted to see it because, hey, it's Brad Pitt.
I actively tried to talk her out of it, explaining that it was going to be about baseball and statistics (two things she finds very boring). She still wanted to go.
We both loved it, and I think she loved it more than me.
While I'm curious as to how the Soderberg version would have looked, I have doubts it would have been as entertaining (and critically acclaimed) for so many people as this one.
That explains all those awards and nominations it got!
That's how my boss reacts when I openly, even willfully, refuse to follow his instructions. He respects me.
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