⚾🍿 Moneyball

The 2002 Oakland Athletics have a third of the richest team's budget, so their general manager stops buying players the way scouts like them and starts buying what the numbers say wins games: getting on base. Everybody he works with thinks he has lost his mind, and then the team wins twenty in a row.

Easter Sunday evening in Averley, on a disc from the library shelf, with Jonas Reuter and my sister half watching, everyone full of lunch.

The reason it is here: it is the most entertaining argument I know for what 00. Statistics for Product Decisions I Hub is trying to teach me. The scouts are not stupid. They are pricing the wrong variable with great confidence, which is most roadmap meetings.

• The film is kinder to the numbers than a statistician would be. One season is a small sample, and it knows that only at the very end.
• I know nothing about baseball and it did not matter.
• Jonas's verdict: a film about a man who cannot watch his own work. He meant it as a compliment.

Four stars, one of them for the timing: two weeks after a midterm that told me I price a few things wrongly myself.

• The scouts' table, early on: a room of experienced men judging players by how they look and carry themselves. He keeps asking what problem they are trying to solve, and nobody answers the question he asked.
• Teaching a catcher to play first base. The plan on paper meets a man who is frightened of the ball.
• The afternoon of trades, done on three phones at once. The only action sequence in the film and nobody stands up.
• The twentieth game. An eleven-run lead disappears, and the player nobody else wanted ends it with one swing.
• The clip near the end of a heavy minor-league batter who falls over rounding first base because he has not noticed the ball left the ground. The whole argument in half a minute.
• The drive home, with his daughter's song playing.