Orange County Register

OK, I finished reading the script of the Moneyball movie that likely never will be.

In a way I never expected, it works at times. Brad Pitt was reading these lines in my head, and they worked. The scenes — walking through airports, arguing with the manager — seemed like real movie scenes. The book broke momentum so many times to follow individual player histories or statistical evolution, but the movie largely condenses those chapters into a page or two, and instead focuses on Beane. We get more of Beane’s personal life, more of his daughter and girlfriends, more of his personal squabbles. So, yeah, it’s a movie.

That all said, it’s not a great movie. The first act works, the last act works, the middle 60 minutes are a bit soft. The A’s astounding mid-season turnaround isn’t handled very well; we’re supposed to believe that acquiring Ricardo Rincon was the difference between a sub-.500 team and a 20-game winning streak. No surprise that it would be hard to show such a turnaround; random fluctuation and regressing to the mean are hard to show on film. But that’s exactly why a realistic look at a baseball season seemed so difficult.

I expected lots of long lectures. There are very few. The longest uninterrupted chunks of dialogue are probably by former scouting director Grady Fuson and by Joe Morgan, both bashing Beane.

What does work is the underlying idea that baseball is frustrating, especially for a perfectionist like Beane. We all hear the cliche that the best hitters fail 7 out of 10 times, but making smart decisions about baseball players is nearly as difficult. Players don’t behave predictably; if they did, we’d have no Raul Ibanez this year, no Cliff Lee last year, no Howie Kendrick and Vlad Guerrero scuffling, no Chone Figgins rebirth, no Scot Shields (career), no Scot Shields (2009 disaster). What we’re talking about is really a game of margins, where you’re likely to be wrong 51 percent of the time but you’re hoping to be right 51 percent of the time, and if you pull it off you might win a lot of regular season games. And here we have a whole movie that’s supposed to be about this great genius who was competing against the world’s dumbest idiots, and he STILL can’t win a World Series, and STILL a bunch of his draft picks go bust, and STILL he trades Carlos Pena and Jeremy Bonderman for one year of Ted Lilly, and STILL within a couple years he can’t even stay above .500.

Moneyball: The Movie was to be a portrait of an easily frustrated man who found a genie in a bottle, but none of his wishes came out quite like he’d hoped. And I still wish they’d made it.

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