They spent a lot on their team, and they were supposed to be getting on board with SABREnomics-type stuff. Was there ever a more hyped team that does as poorly as the Red Sox consistently do?

BTW, anyone seen Moneyball?

Good to know. And yes, it was truly painful to watch.

based on a book of the same name which tracks the attempt on the part of A’s manager Billy Beane to make it a competitive team, which was pretty hard to do when you’re a small team with not much in terms of team payroll. He did that by employing a bunch of statistics geeks to perform stats analyses of player stats, to make good purchases and more accurately assess their value. This use of stats was called SABREnomics, and revolutionized the way that players are traded and valued. (It’s very controversial among baseball fans.)

I’m a huge baseball nerd, I enjoyed reading “Moneyball”, and think the whole SABREnomics concept is very interesting — but I dislike Aaron Sorkin, and find pretty much everything he’s done in movies and TV to be unwatchable, indulgent dreck. (He made “The West Wing” and “The Social Network”.)

there are basically 3 controversies:

1) Stats and sabermetrics in baseball went from being undervalued to being overvalued very, very quickly. Like anything that’s overhyped, fans got tired of being told that it was “revolutionary”, “historical”, that it completely changed the game, etc. Pushback started, noting that the old way of doing things (hands-on experience and savvy selections based on observation) had its advantages, because a team is more than just a collection of stats: it’s supposed to work well together and be more than the sum of its parts. That’s something that statistics can’t account for (and to be fair to those critics, they have a point when it comes to some of the more zealous/bad implementation of SABREnomics in later adopters).

2) Billy Beane is seen as a jerk with an ego who got lucky. Since SABREnomics, he hasn’t really done anything worth writing home about, and his personality ain’t exactly a shining jewel.

3) This is the big one: some fans say that it has led to a less organic, more soulless experience. They say that having a bunch of Harvard geeks work on a spreadsheet or play with STATA to figure out who’s gonna be on the team takes away the magic of the experience. Personally, I’m not one of those people — I like watching the game and learning about the statistics behind selection.

4) During 2001ish, IIRC, the A’s had a lot of players who did steroids. Now, the team still did well after the steroids thing blew over, but you still have a lot of people out there saying that the A’s did well only because of the steroids (which is not true).

It’s not unethical and it was a good idea, but it’s now the consensus, and some fans honestly don’t like it, or have a bone to pick with the A’s team of that time.

The only show on TV that I watch regularly without being sure if I really like it.

On the one hand, it’s set in the 60s, has great artistanship behind it, and is reasonably entertaining considering that it is, at heart, a high-concept soap opera.

On the other hand… it’s written from the “enlightened” POV of a Boomer, and is a wildly inaccurate portrayal of the era. It’s also a little more than over the top, sometimes. Then there’s the Betty Draper subplot. Ugh.

Of course, it does have Christina Hendricks in it…

It’s not nearly as good as the one my grandma makes, though: I’ve been asking her how to make hers for a couple years, now, but she doesn’t have a recipe so much as a practiced hand, when it comes to ingredients. Me? I’m too methodical to go with a pinchful of sugar and “this much” milk as a recipe.

Not as good as BoB, but still great. BoB just had so many great moments: I recently re-watched it in Blu-Ray, and I forgot how superb the opening episode was. Also, I just love that episode where they land in the Netherlands: it was really interesting how jubilant and disturbing the liberation “celebration” could be at the same time.

Have you seen Inglorious Basterds? I recently saw it, and was quite amused — definitely very different from any other WWII movies I’ve seen, that’s for sure. I’ve been on a WWII kick recently: rewatched Das Boot, the truly amazing Clint Eastwood Flags of our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima set, and of course Saving Private Ryan. Any others I should watch?

who thinks that football was better when they didn’t start making all of these arbitrary rules about team payrolls, salary caps and the like to try to “equalize” the teams. We never see those great historical teams like the ’49ers or the Cowboys of the mid-90s, to say nothing of those awesome rivalries like Giants v Redskins and 49ers v Cowboys. Now, all you see is a bunch of flawed and incomplete teams that are constantly shifting around. To me, it’s just boring compared to how it used to be.

It’s always nice to have some fresh eyes, especially if they are eyes that take in a lot of baseball and football. (If you don’t watch basketball… then we’ll just have to ease you into it, heh.)