So I decided to go to a theater for the first time in ages, and I watched Trouble With the Curve, starring Clint Eastwood and Amy Adams. I had some trepidation going into this movie, seeing as how it’s pretty much one gigantic counterpoint to Moneyball, which was a story and concept I liked, and the movie wasn’t half bad either. But the movie focuses around baseball, and uses the Atlanta Braves as the team that the characters revolve around, so it was kind of unavoidable in the end.
As a movie plot, Trouble With the Curve is nothing spectacular at all, but it’s far from the worst flick on the planet too. It’s predictable, the characters are cliche, and it tended to drag on at times, if not by any means other than repeating the plot device of “emotionally-detached aging father has difficulty bonding with now-grown-up daughter so walks away.” At this point in time, I’m having difficulty in appreciating Clint Eastwood’s former greatness when he’s playing these vulnerable and cliched, gruff, elderly men. And as for Amy Adams, I figured I would come out of the theater with a renewed crush on Amy Adams, but yeah no, not really.
As an experience, it was enjoyable to watch scenes taking place right here in Atlanta, and other parts of Georgia. I remember the traffic problems that arose due to production equipment and trailers that lurked around Georgia Tech, one of the baseball fields used in the movie. The Silver Skillet was used in one of the many scenes of daughter and father walk away from each other. The nerd in me noted inaccuracies in ballpark venues for the Rome Braves, and other minor league territories brought up in the flick, but I’ll spare everyone else the details.
But in the end, I’m certainly glad I didn’t pay a regular admission to see this. At 1:51 long, it feels pretty long, and I’d be pissed if I went into an evening showing, and ended up coming up at A.M. hours for this.
Trouble With the Curve isn’t a bad movie by any means, but there is a part of me that really doesn’t like it. As everyone very well knows, I’m a big nerd when it comes to baseball. The story of Moneyball is one of my favorite books ever, and the advancement of statistics as a result of Moneyball is something that I’m very interested in these days. I enjoy poring through baseball numbers and trying to find rhyme and reason behind the way that the game works sometimes. I know this is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I would prefer it if those who weren’t interested to simply respect my interests and be on their merry way.
But you see, for reasons unknown, it doesn’t seem to be able to work that way in the baseball community. There are people who are staunch believers that Moneyball is the future and should be the present, and have absolutely no respect for scouts, subjective observations and trained opinions. And then there are Trouble With the Curve sympathizers who believe scouting is the only way, and that all these new-fangled numbers, statistics and baseball acronyms are all a bunch of nerdy hooey.
It bothers me that Trouble With the Curve appears to exist as one gigantic middle finger to Moneyball. What’s worse is that the movie latches itself onto the Atlanta Braves, my team. It’s bad enough that the general perspective of the Braves is one that is a little old fashioned, one that relies more on the Trouble With the Curve methods over Moneyball, but a movie like this is going to help solidify that notion; the Oakland Athletics have long moved on from the methodology in which the Moneyball flick was written about, but if you ask any casual baseball fan to associate a word with “Moneyball,” and it will almost always be the A’s. And vice-versa.
I like to consider myself one of a teeny-tiny minority third party in the two sides of the baseball community. The sliver of the pie-chart that is so thin that it cannot be physically labeled and necessitates an arrow pointing to text with its appropriate label. I’m one of those guys that respects and understands both parties when it comes to scouting versus statistics. I’m not naive to believe that it’s really just Huzzard and I on this boat, but it sure as shit feels that way sometimes.
But I really do believe that both methods of player evaluation genuinely can co-exist in harmony. It’s really not that difficult to believe, if members of both sides of this coin would just open up their minds a little bit. Computers and stat trackers are wonderful methods of finding the cold-hard facts about players, down to their past performance and even predictive performance. But those computers can’t see what good scouts see when it comes to a player’s personality, their conduct on and off the field, and other blatantly obvious things that computers can’t tell, like how they perform in cold weather versus hot weather.
In a perfect world, teams use computers to churn out numbers on a regular basis, and different intervals. If a player is tearing up the game, scouts can give them a look to see what their weaknesses and places of improvement are, or if a guy is genuinely ready for promotion. If a player is doing poorly suddenly, it’s the scout that’s going to find out that the guy is having relationship problems, or simply is feeling home sick or having medical issues.
Scouts are no doubt integral to the continuation of the game of baseball. Statistics and number-crunching have shone lights onto places that sometimes get overlooked, or things that are so obvious they cannot be ignored when seen in a nutshell. It’s not impossible for baseball to continue to exist with both methodologies in place, but for some reason, there is always this resistance to co-exist.
And as a result, we get films like Moneyball, but then it becomes, versus Trouble With the Curve.
