Yes, I'm Kind Of Excited About The Moneyball Movie.....

They said it couldn't be done. I'm talking about the baseball blogosphere, particularly the sabermetric branch. The book "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game" treats Billy Beane's approach as GM of the Oakland A's almost like a business school case study. And Moneyball had become iconic, and representative of, the "scouts vs. stats" battle prevalent in the blogosphere five or six years ago. Sabermetric bloggers have been skeptical over the last couple of years that the movie version of the book can be reasonably true to the Moneyball story while also entertaining the average theater goer. Bloggers guessed that the movie would result in something ridiculous.

Now I am seeing advertising for the movie Moneyball, and I'm excited about seeing the movie. Here is the movie trailer. And it looks pretty good. Sure, you can't tell everything about a movie from the trailer. But doesn't this make you want to see the movie? I write about sabermetrics and quantitative approaches to baseball here at TCB. And now Brad Pitt & Co. bring some of those concepts to life in the theater? Awesome. I wonder what Joe Morgan will say about the movie?

In honor of mentioning Moneyball and Bill Beane, I will show how the Astros fare on the Beane count.

Rob Neyer invented the Beane Count, named for Billy Beane. The Beane count ranks teams based on combining each team's ranking on offensive home runs and walks and pitching home runs and walks. Where do the Astros rank? I think you can guess. The Astros rank dead last in the NL. The Astros' Beane Count is the worst in the majors, outstripping the Twins at the bottom of the AL. (I'm not sure that the NL and AL rankings are directly comparable, because of the DH, but that's how it turns out anyway.) Also, does anyone see the irony that Beane's current A's team is ranked 10th in the AL for the Beane Count?

Any thoughts about the movie?