Moneyball

I read the book.  My son told me I would love the movie but I've never seen it. There're a lot of movies I've never seen which I am assured I would like, and that is probably true. I have something that I now distrust about the medium, which is unfair of me.  Because I am sucked in by its charms so easily, I am aware how powerfully it can mislead. But that is true of all art.  Art can condense an idea, even a subtle one, and teach it better than the strict truth. If you want to give a sense of the British Raj and espionage during the Great Game in India, you write Kim.  It's better than a dozen lectures on the subject in terms of staying power and teaching. 

Yet they are all liars, attempting to control how you see a particular perspective to the exclusion of others.

Actual baseball players criticised the movie when it came out because "not a single scene actually happened." For those of us who followed baseball statistics and rejoiced in the 80s as the statheads gradually established their bona fides, making better predictions than the supposed experts in a field where prediction is difficult. It was Yogi Berra, after all , who may have said "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future." Because baseball is a series of separate events, it lends itself to analysis and prediction better than other sports, but even that is fraught with peril. 

This scene captures the essence of the conflict beautifully, but it never happened. Bill James, most famous of the statisticians, willingly conceded that there were things scouts could discover and predict for you about a player that he could not: how hard he worked, whether he was coachable, whether he was going to throw it all away because of poor character.  None of that is in this scene. But because I support the idea, I think it's a great scene.