seekingferret (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
seekingferret) wrote2015-08-06 10:18 am
seekingferret) wrote2015-08-06 10:18 am
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A couple nights ago I watched the Moneyball movie as a followup to the book. It was um... in some ways it was worse than the book. In some ways it was more interestingly bad.
The filmmakers reproduce a scene from early in the book where Beane sits in a room full of his scouts and listens impatiently as they talk about 'tools' and physical attributes rather than about statistics. Lewis's version is subtly more interesting in a million ways: Lewis captures the mix of older and younger scouts, adaptable scouts and inflexible scouts, thoughtful scouts and intuitive scouts. The movie shows a room full of old men, emphasizing this by having one of the most outspoken ones wearing a hearing aide. It is lazy and ageist and it is not as interesting a story as the reality, or even Lewis's botched reality.
But basically the plot of the film is Regression to the Mean: The Movie. The Oakland A's jump out of the gate slowly, underperforming as compared to what their statistical output as far as run creation would predict. Fans are unhappy, players are unhappy, media is unhappy, ownership is unhappy. Billy Beane and [Pseudo-Paul DePodesta with some Sandy Alderson thrown in] tell them not to worry, the team will regress to the mean. Gradually, it happens. Everyone is happy. The end.
This is phenomenally boring. The movie tries to deal with this problem by obfuscating its own thesis. Beane's trade of Jeremy Giambi for John Mabry is, pretty clearly, an emotional overreaction by Beane that worked against his own theory of run creation, but in the movie it's positioned to suggest it somehow played a role in changing the team's fortunes. Beane tries to maintain separation from his players to maintain objectivity early in the film, but after the Giambi-Mabry trade, the film starts to show Beane and fake-Depodesta lecturing the players on sabermetric tactical principles, suggesting that it was selling the system to the team's players, leadership on Beane's part, that caused the turnaround... even though the movie's whole thesis is that the turnaround was just regression to the mean. This tension between sports movie tropes and moneyball's mathematical truths is inharmonious at best.
But it is interesting how much the movie is committed to not looking like a sports movie. We barely see any baseball being played in the movie, and when we do, it's shot in explicitly trope-subversive ways. The trope of the players fading off the field to leave an empty stadium at the end of the season is used particularly effectively in this regard.
Unfortunately, instead of baseball imagery we get weird, fetishy number imagery. Tables of data shot out of focus, shot with the column headings cut off, scrolled through too fast to make sense of. Math as magic, whee! Never in the movie does Sorkin trust the numbers to actually tell a story. People have to tell the stories for the numbers, and they usually do a pretty poor job of it.
The filmmakers reproduce a scene from early in the book where Beane sits in a room full of his scouts and listens impatiently as they talk about 'tools' and physical attributes rather than about statistics. Lewis's version is subtly more interesting in a million ways: Lewis captures the mix of older and younger scouts, adaptable scouts and inflexible scouts, thoughtful scouts and intuitive scouts. The movie shows a room full of old men, emphasizing this by having one of the most outspoken ones wearing a hearing aide. It is lazy and ageist and it is not as interesting a story as the reality, or even Lewis's botched reality.
But basically the plot of the film is Regression to the Mean: The Movie. The Oakland A's jump out of the gate slowly, underperforming as compared to what their statistical output as far as run creation would predict. Fans are unhappy, players are unhappy, media is unhappy, ownership is unhappy. Billy Beane and [Pseudo-Paul DePodesta with some Sandy Alderson thrown in] tell them not to worry, the team will regress to the mean. Gradually, it happens. Everyone is happy. The end.
This is phenomenally boring. The movie tries to deal with this problem by obfuscating its own thesis. Beane's trade of Jeremy Giambi for John Mabry is, pretty clearly, an emotional overreaction by Beane that worked against his own theory of run creation, but in the movie it's positioned to suggest it somehow played a role in changing the team's fortunes. Beane tries to maintain separation from his players to maintain objectivity early in the film, but after the Giambi-Mabry trade, the film starts to show Beane and fake-Depodesta lecturing the players on sabermetric tactical principles, suggesting that it was selling the system to the team's players, leadership on Beane's part, that caused the turnaround... even though the movie's whole thesis is that the turnaround was just regression to the mean. This tension between sports movie tropes and moneyball's mathematical truths is inharmonious at best.
But it is interesting how much the movie is committed to not looking like a sports movie. We barely see any baseball being played in the movie, and when we do, it's shot in explicitly trope-subversive ways. The trope of the players fading off the field to leave an empty stadium at the end of the season is used particularly effectively in this regard.
Unfortunately, instead of baseball imagery we get weird, fetishy number imagery. Tables of data shot out of focus, shot with the column headings cut off, scrolled through too fast to make sense of. Math as magic, whee! Never in the movie does Sorkin trust the numbers to actually tell a story. People have to tell the stories for the numbers, and they usually do a pretty poor job of it.