The Theoretical Moneyball Movie Everyone Would Simultaneously Hate and Love

As many of you know, I spend most of my time doing math at work. I spend all day talking about Bayesian Networks. This translates into two effects

1. I am completely fascinated by the encroachment of math into sports, an area that dominates my personal life
2. I know exactly how uninteresting it is to watch me at work. I video taped myself one day. The most compelling thing was a particularly dramatic sneeze

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I loved Moneyball. I thought it was compelling reading. I loved that that very summer the book was a sensation, the Wall Street Journal became singularly obsessed with explaining every single stat Bill James ever came up. I am equally fascinated by the work Daryl Morely is trying to do with Basketball and the Houston Rockets. I love that his models spit out that my favorite player, Ron Artest, was someone he should go after. This stuff brings joy to my otherwise dreary life.

I am not at all confused about the potential of Moneyball as a film. If you make it a documentary, you will want to pull your eyelashes out one at a time. Baseball is mostly dull to watch, and from first hand experience I promise you, math is dull. There are other issues. By all accounts, the protagonist of Moneyball, Billy Beane, is a mega d*uche of the first order. He thinks he is smarter than everyone and not even remotely sympathetic. So that won't work. Everyone agreed here. So of course the writers decided to focus on Beane's relationship with his contemporaries (first in the NY Mets farm system in the late 70s/early 80s) and later on his relationship with Paul DePodesta and the other future GMs who learned under him, sort of like Entourage. Yawn, it's not 2004, we all need to move on. Soderberg saw this and came in and tried to apply a more documentary feel. I already covered why that's lame.

So here's my thought. If you are silly enough to still be reading that's your fault.

• Show as little baseball as possible. Relegate all scenes to the locker room, the hotel, the bar etc. Baseball is dull on TV. Everyone knows this.
• Play up the NY vs. small town dynamic. Oakland vs. NY. Everyone hates a bully and no one is a better bully than the NY Yankees. Make them look as ridiculous as possible. While we're at it make sure the Mets look like Frank Stallone.
• The natural drama is between the old world of baseball and the new world brought forth by the quants. That tension is potentially hilarious. I think there is a lot to be done with the colliding of two worlds. I like the idea of a broken down drunken, sunburnt scout realizing that he is being marginalized by some preppy MIT d*uchebag. I see the preppy showing the scout what to look for and the scout showing the preppy how to bang a waitress in a public restroom. I see Back To School meets Major League. Is Rodney Dangerfield still alive?
• There is a lot of fun having in baseball. None of it happens on the field. Follow the guys on the road. Build on my earlier theme, we need to catch up with the hoochies they pick up as players roll through the minor leagues. We need to see the silly little towns where minor league baseball is played and the players who get dropped off there. In my mind I see scouts learning that that the need to correlate drinking and banging patterns to on the field performance.I also see hilarity in 15 year old dominican prospects banging the women who host them. I am thinking of Bull Durham a lot here.
• Push Billy to the background, Billy is annoying. The story is not about Billy its about the mathematicians he hired. At most he should be a screaming voice on the other side of a door or on the other side of the telephone. Focus on the quants, play it up like A Beautiful Mind with numbers and patterns emerging from crazy newspaper clippings.
• They also sit in the oldest, ugliest, most out of date stadium in the Major Leagues. Make it a key character. The offices falling apart would be a nice touch and add drama and comedy to all the hours of of watching game tape that Paul DePodesta and JP Riccardi will be doing on screen.
• Take as many opportunities as possible to make former NY Mets GM, current EPSN Analyst and all around media-whore Steve Phillips look silly. This would be the truest element to the book, as the publication of that book basically cost him his job.
• Introduce a fan perspective. Oakland fans are totally insane. They are roughest people on earth, really just Raider fans waiting for September to come. Make sure fans are constantly confused by what's going on - the trades being made, the guys being released. He can serve as a narrator of sorts. Create a key fan character who is likable but totally strange and somehow regularly brutalized by the other A's fans. Ride the Zach Galifianakis wave here and ride it hard.

There you have it, my seven point plan to make a highly successful and very entertaining movie based on Michael Lewis' Moneyball.