Blogfight? A Conversation About Moneyball

By The Common Man and Bill

This weekend, Bill and The Common Man each separately attended a showing of Moneyball. Rather than provide you with a traditional review, which neither of us feel particularly qualified to do, we thought a discussion of the film and our reactions to it might be appropriate. In other words, we’re not telling you how you should feel about Moneyball, but how we felt as we watched it.


What follows is a slightly edited chat transcript. Be warned: (1) if you think there’s such a thing as “spoilers” for a movie like this (and we don’t think there is, really, if you have read the book, followed baseball in 2002 or have ever been to Baseball-Reference.com), what follows is absolutely full of them; and (2) we did say slightly edited – the transcript below is really just a conversation and isn’t nearly up to this site’s usual grammar or style standards. Nonetheless, enjoy!

Bill: So what did you think of Moneyball?

TCM: Moneyball is Johnny Damon: good, but not HOF quality. Overrated by casual fans, underrated by the stathead community and with a really underwhelming start and finish to its career.

Breaking News: Michael Lewis Doesn't "Get" Moneyball Either

By The Common Man

If you’re a baseball fan, there’s a good chance that you’re profoundly interested in the new film Moneyball, that is set to debut on September 23rd at a theater near you. The Common Man is planning to see it, but hasn’t seen it yet, so this is not a review of the film. Others, including Aaron Gleeman, Keith Law, and John Bonnes, have seen it. Gleeman and Bonnes found themselves entertained by the film, with Aaron saying that “what the movie lacked in historical accuracy it made up for in witty dialogue, likable characters, and a surprising amount of humor.”


Keith had an entirely different reaction, calling it

“an absolute mess of a film, the type of muddled end product you’d expect from a project that took several years and went through multiple writers and directors. Even good performances by a cast of big names and some clever makeup work couldn’t save this movie, and if I hadn’t been planning to review it, I would have walked out.”

Yeesh. KLaw goes on to lament the movie’s “lampooning of scouts, which draws from the book, [and] isn’t any more welcome on screen (where some of the scouts are played by actual scouts) than it was on the page.”

Good heavens, but the Moneyball movie looks like garbage

By Bill


I think this is the first time I've ever embedded a video on this blog. Here's the just-released, two-and-a-half minute trailer for the forthcoming film version of Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Robin Wright and Philip Seymour Hoffman and written by the excellent Aaron Sorkin:



Go ahead, soak it in. You've read the book, you remember the book, and if you're of a certain age or came to the sabermetricians' party at a certain time, the book probably changed your baseball-watching life. Watch that a couple times and see if that looks like the book to you. Or like a movie that you'd ever want to watch.

I've been...not excited, necessarily, but very interested in this movie for a while now. So when I saw that the trailer was made available yesterday, I was pretty stoked. And then when I watched it and saw that the movie looks like a steaming pile of fabricated crap, I was...a bit disappointed.