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.