‘Moneyball’ has a new trailer

‘Moneyball’ is a baseball drama starring Brad Pitt, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jonah Hill, from the director of ‘Capote’. Sony Pictures describes it like this…

Based on a true story, Moneyball is a movie for anybody who has ever dreamed of taking on the system.
Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s and the guy who assembles the team, who has an epiphany: all of baseball’s conventional wisdom is wrong.
Forced to reinvent his team on a tight budget, Beane will have to outsmart the richer clubs.

That’s right. This guy broke all the rules and created a new system so a small market team like Oakland could beat dynasties like New York and Boston in a sport with no salary cap.

Except that he didn’t create it, the system is called sabermetrics and has been around since the 1980’s, and he didn’t implement it in Oakland, his predecessor did (the Jonah Hill character doesn’t exist), and during his 13 years as GM the A’s have never won the American League much less a World Series. In fact they haven’t been above .500 in 5 years, while Tampa, who is in an even smaller market and has New York and Boston in the same fucking division, was in the Series 3 years ago. So far this season Oakland is last in their division, with the second worst record in the American League.

So this movie tells the story of how the worlds most boring sport added math to create a system that doesn’t work. Holy shit, can I go stand in line now?

(be sure to note the meeting with the A’s scouts, who are all depicted as being in their 200’s. Yeah movie, we fuckin get it, it’s New vs. Old. You didn’t have to literally show that. Let me guess, their names are stuff like Stan Still, Theo Oldway and Tommy Noblacks. I hope everyones bifocals and VCR-sized hearing aids aren’t too subtle. Maybe they should re-shoot this scene and have them holding giant horns up to their ears. Would these be the same scouts who drafted the American League Rookie of the Year back to back to back just 10 years earlier? Why not 4 years in a row? Clearly they have no idea what they’re doing.)