My Trouble with the Curve

This is a place where I like to run my proverbial mouth about things I’m imminently unqualified to discuss. Today I’ve got idle commentary on not one but two such subjects – baseball and film.

Part of my 16-hour butt-a-thon from Hong Kong to New York involved watching movies to avoid falling asleep, one of which was Trouble with the Curve. It’s one of those movies that triggers my dislike for Hollywood’s predictable, trite and contrived plot lines, only this time with thinly veiled propaganda that made watching it all the more teeth-gnashing an experience.

The film is quite openly a response to Moneyball, the Brad Pitt movie based on the Michael Lewis book about how the Oakland A’s ten years ago began using new baseball statistics to measure player performance. Moneyball tells the story of a coach and a nerdy number cruncher that use “Sabermetrics” to find uncelebrated players that other teams pass over, and then pick them up on the cheap while competitors pay top dollar for unproven talent that doesn’t work out. The movie and the book deride the old-school scouts who recruit talent based on observations of players in the field and the instincts built up over a career.

The Trouble with the Curve is an attempted revival of the scouts. I wasn’t sold.

Here's my cheeky synopsis.

Grumpy old scout (played by Clint Eastwood - who else?) is about to lose his job with the Atlanta Braves due to the expansion of Excel spreadsheet-wielding Sabermetrics guys who are all hot to trot about some new kid that the entire league is after. Grumpy Scout has a long, drivelly rapprochement with his daughter for most of the movie, and in the last 15 minutes of the film discovers the hotshot can’t hit a curve ball because the sound the bat makes when he swings doesn’t ring right to him.

The Braves draft the hotshot anyway. Grumpy Scout’s daughter, who worked for seven years at a law firm without a day’s vacation even though she never wanted to be a lawyer, tails after her dad on scouting trips to force him to admit he’s going blind. On the lawn outside their hotel she stumbles across a lad playing catch with his kid brother, drags him to the Braves training grounds where he promptly strikes out the recently drafted hotshot, to the outrage of the coaching staff. The manager sacks the Sabermetrics guy, extends Clint Eastwood’s contract, and hires on his daughter as a new scout. Turns out grumpy old grandpa new best after all. It helps that the Sabermetrics guy is a chauvinist jerk and the failed hotshot a racist and pompous boor.

Really?

To be fair, Moneyball was no less propagandistic in its promotion of Sabermetrics, which is itself not above criticism. Allegations of rampant steroid use in the Oakland A’s in the early 2000s, as my friend DW points out, could have been as plausible explanation for their success as their new approach to baseball stats. And believe me, I sympathize with those who worry about the armies of MBAs who are convinced that their often dubious quantitative methods are a replacement for decades of experience in the field – most notably US education.

Reading and watching Moneyball, however, made me feel as though I’d learned something about the game. What did The Trouble teach me? That a blind 80-year-old grumpy grandpa who burns hamburgers in his kitchen and thinks vegetarians are panty-waists can sniff out a batter that can’t hit a curveball? Was this really the best case they could make for the scouts?

At least it was an hour and a half that I wasn’t sleeping in an awkward position in an airplane seat.