DownSwinging.com

When I heard that Michael Lewis’ classic baseball book, Moneyball, was being made into a Hollywood movie, I was pretty surprised. Moneyball is one of my favorite books, actually probably my favorite book. Not like baseball books, all books. So asI said, when I heard that it was going to be the latest blockbuster hit, starring Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, I didn’t really get it. I mean, assuming they weren’t going to include a lot of statistics, numbers and analysis in the film, I can’t see how it could be longer than 15 minutes, and how it could really be interesting. I guess maybe some people were anticipating this movie with glee, though clearly Sony wasn’t as soon as the powers that be read Steven Soderbergh’s rewritten script. Either way, I wasn’t looking forward to it. It would probably ruin my attachment to the book because the movie clearly couldn’t have been good, and I would have been disappointed.

And I know this is going to sound a little elitest, but if the movie had been made, think about all of the baseball pseudo-intellectuals we would have all had to put up with. I mean, literally every guy that watched a baseball game once would think that he was a genius because he figured out what OBP is. Come draft time, dudes who didn’t even realize there was a MLB draft would have been ademantly asserting that drafting high school arms is too risky and teams should go all College.

I guess you could argue that imparting more knowledge on the rest of the world about a more modern form of baseball knowledge would be a good thing, but I just don’t want to have to deal with it. I’m perfectly content with the fact that some people know a lot of baseball, and some people don’t. So, if Sony keeps their head on, they’ll realize that Moneyball is a project to scrap for good.