#EverySimpsonsEver -- Day Eleven

Really. It's almost over. One more day after this. (I repeat: stop applauding!)

MUST-SEE!

8/31 12:00 AM ET “The Greatest Story Ever D’ohed” -- The Simpsons join the Flanderseseses on a trip to Jerusalem. Guest stars Sacha Baron Cohen, but not as Borat or Bruno or Ali G.

8/31 5:00 AM ET “MoneyBART” -- Lisa becomes the coach of Bart's Little League team and, using sabermetrics, the team starts winning. Notable for a very unusual opening couch gag from the artist known as Banksy.

8/31 7:30 AM ET “The Fight Before Christmas” -- Formatted more like a Halloween special, with four different Christmas-related dreams, including one with Martha Stewart and another with Katy Perry in a live-action segment featuring the Simpsons characters as Muppet-esque puppets.

8/31 9:00 AM ET “Flaming Moe” -- Not to be confused with "Flaming Moe's," this is one more super-gay-gay-gay episode. With the help of Waylon Smithers, Moe's Tavern becomes Mo's, a trendy gay bar. If you've ever wanted to see Homer and Marge voguing, this is your episode.

8/31 8:00 PM ET “The D’oh-cial Network” -- Lisa creates SpringFace, a social networking site. Featuring a couch gag with David Letterman and a brief bit at the end with Armie Hammer as the Winklevoss twins (just like in "The Social Network"). They're competing in a rowing event at the 2012 London Olympics...against the Bouvier twins, Patty and Selma.

8/31 9:30 PM ET “At Long Last Leave” -- The 500th episode, in which the residents of Springfield vote to evict the Simpsons from the town.

MEH. M-E-H, MEH.

8/31 1:00 AM ET “Chief of Hearts”

8/31 4:00 AM ET “Elementary School Musical”

8/31 4:30 AM ET “Loan-a Lisa”

8/31 6:30 AM ET “The Fool Monty”

8/31 7:00 AM ET “How Munched Is That Birdie in the Window?”

8/31 8:00 AM ET “Donnie Fatso”

8/31 8:30 AM ET “Moms I’d Like to Forget”

8/31 9:30 AM ET “Homer the Father”

8/31 1:00 PM ET “The Real Housewives of Fat Tony” -- Fat Tony marries Selma, making her Selma Bouvier-Terwilliger-Hutz-McClure-Stu-Simpson-D'Amico.

8/31 4:30 PM ET “Replaceable You” -- I can't, for the life of me, remember anything about this episode. Even after reading the Wikipedia entry, reading that Jane Lynch appeared in it, I can't remember it at all. Hey, maybe it's a brilliant episode. But I'm gonna say...no.

8/31 7:00 PM ET “Holidays of Future Passed”

8/31 7:30 PM ET “Politically Inept, with Homer Simpson” -- With the utterly repugnant Ted Nugent.

Ballpark Rankings Update - O.co Coliseum

While I was in the San Francisco area I was able to get to an Oakland Athletics game. They play in what is now called the O.co Coliseum. O.co is the new name for Overstock.com. It's a terrible name but the sponsorship makes sense, since the whole Moneyball theory the A's operate on is based on trying to get quality players at a cheap price. Anyway, O.co is an old place -- older than the Vet. It opened in 1966 for the NFL Raiders and the A's moved in from Kansas City in 1968. So old that the men's room had troughs instead of urinals. I've taken a vow to never use a trough.

Being one of those multi-purpose places, the sightlines aren't so great in some areas. And even where I sat (seven rows behind the visitors' dugout; thanks for not buying up the good seats, A's fans), it seemed far away because there's a lot of room between the stands and the foul lines. That helps pitchers a lot, because foul pops that go into the seats in many places are easily caught here.

I stood up between innings of the game (in which the former Philadelphia A's beat Detroit, the day after the Tigers clinched the AL Central title) and circled around to take this video. YouTube is having issues again, or something, because the sound

Quick Review: Moneyball

Remember those days when I went to see at least one movie each week, if not more? It's been a while. Back then the Phillies were still winning games. Speaking of baseball, today I went to see "Moneyball." It's based on the Michael Lewis book about Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane and his use of sabermetrics to put together a competitive roster despite extremely limited financial resources, focusing particularly on the 2002 season. That year the A's, despite losing big names Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon and Jason Isringhausen to big-market clubs, won 103 games, including an AL-record 20 straight.

In other words, the stat geeks who are doing their best to ruin the game now have their own movie. And it stars Brad Pitt as Billy Beane. So there's been a lot of hype about it in baseball circles as well as the usual places where movies are discussed.

Pitt is fine, but the movie itself doesn't entirely hold up. A lot of scenes -- Beane and his assistant GM (Jonah Hill, whose Peter Brand is either based on Paul DePodesta, the actual assistant GM, or some amalgam of DePodesta, Theo Epstein and possibly others, depending on what you read), going about rebuilding the club, aggravating the old-time scouts, or Beane's clashing with A's manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) have snap to them, but to balance it out (or to try to attract people who don't like sports, or women, or something) there are also a few softer scenes featuring Beane and his daughter. These scenes, and the entire ending, in which Beane is wooed by the Red Sox after the 2002 season, drag the film down. And there's some other fictionalization. Trades that actually occurred two months apart are depicted as happening almost simultaneously at the trade deadline.

So the movie, like the concept, is flawed.

2010 League Championship Series Picks

Since it's about a half-hour until the first pitch of the American League Championship Series, I figured I shouldn't wait any longer to go on record with my predictions. In the first round I had Giants in 4 (perfect), Phillies in 4 (they won in 3), Yankees in 5 (they also won in 3) and Rays in 4 (womp womp).

Texas Rangers vs. New York Yankees: The Rangers won the first two in Tampa, then lost two at home, then went back to Tampa and won. This means a couple of things: they aren't entirely fazed by playoff pressure, but they're also not quite up to the task here, as much as I'd like them to be. Losing those games at home meant Cliff Lee had to start Game 5 against the Rays, meaning he can't pitch until Game 3 in this series and can only start twice against the Yankees. I really want to be wrong here, but...Yankees in 6.


Philadelphia Phillies vs. San Francisco Giants: Will the much-hyped Roy Halladay-Tim Lincecum matchup in Game 1 live up to its billing? Speaking of which, some stat nut decided that Lincecum's complete-game shutout against Atlanta was a better performance than Halladay's no-hitter against the Reds based on some idiotic numerical crap. These Moneyball freaks just live to ruin everything. I think "The Simpsons" summed it up best in Sunday's "MoneyBART" episode, in which Lisa took over as Bart's Little League coach and then had to learn the game. (I thought it was one of their better episodes in recent years, actually.) She came upon Springfield's sabermetricians (at Moe's), and leader of the stat nuts Bill James has a cameo -- he's shown on an online video in which he says, "I made baseball as much fun as doing your taxes!" Truer words were never spoken, Bill, even if you think you were making fun of yourself. But I digress. Both teams have strong pitching, so it'll come down to which offense can generate enough production on a given night, making it probably a tough series. But the Phils' offense has more potential to explode, and if they do, it'll end more quickly. Phillies in 6.

Some Sports Illustrated Stuff

A week ago tomorrow, the cover of Sports Illustrated featured a headline for an article on baseball's spring training: "The Unlikely Genius Behind the New Moneyball." I wanted to vomit. Wasn't the old Moneyball bad enough? The premise of "Moneyball" -- that a focus on statistics, including newly invented and bizarre statistics, is more important in building a great team than things like scouting, watching games and actually seeing how players perform, not to mention spending lots of money -- has always been flawed. The main practitioner, the Oakland A's under general manager Billy Beane, won a few division titles but never got into a World Series, and haven't been a winning team in the last three years.

So what of this "new" Moneyball? The article itself, while it does delve into some statistical stupidity, actually makes a good point. It features the Seattle Mariners and their GM, Jack Zduriencik, and the team's concentrating on defense, leading to improvement overall (from 61 wins in 2008 to 85 last year). Good defense makes the pitching staff better, and we know how important good pitching is. And what Zduriencik says his team is doing is blending the old and new -- using some statistical analysis while still relying on good scouting. This seems to me like good common sense. With the M's getting Cliff Lee from the Phillies, they should be even better in 2010.

As for the SI that will arrive in my mailbox tomorrow, there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that this is the cover:

 

The good news is there's this thing called the Sports Illustrated cover jinx...