I’m tooling along in an American Airlines flight from JFK to SFO and I just finished watching the movie Moneyball. I had blogged about the book (here and here), but this is the first time I’ve actually seen the movie. It’s beyond good. It’s great. It pretty much had to be, given that one of the writers was my favorite, Aaron Sorkin, he of A Few Good Men, which I’ve seen, oh, about 10 times and The American President, which I’ve seen at least 5 times.
In my previous posts, I focused on arbitrage and randomness. My favorite scene is on arbitrage: it’s where he’s dealing back and forth for a pitcher. It has such a great energy and pizzazz. I had had a coke, a tomato juice, and some water and needed a bathroom break, but no way would I put down the earphones until that scene was over.
I also loved the touch with his daughter. This is not in the book: it’s pure Hollywood. But it’s beautiful Hollywood, as I think most fathers with young double-digit-aged daughters in the present or the past will appreciate.
READER COMMENTS
Jack
Jan 18 2012 at 2:38pm
I agree (about the book, haven’t seen the movie); there are great business and finance lessons about arbitrage, valuation, synthetic assets (when they go about “replicating” Johnny Damon!), randomness and hindsight bias (the absurd cause-and-effect stories sports writers come up with), and even something like Gary Becker’s theory of labor market discrimination, whereby in a free labor market non-discriminating employers will outperform discriminating ones, other things equal. (Here of course the discrimination is much less severe, being based on appearances and mythological qualities… the good body, the good face, etc.)
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