A film that has been getting a lot of press lately is "Moneyball" starring Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. The Film, based on the best-selling book by Michael Lewis, is about the sabermetric statistics revolution the devoured baseball in the late '90's and early 2000's. The movie centers around Billy Beane, Pitt's character, the much maligned general manager of the Oakland Athletics. The cash-strapped franchise was looking for ways to stay competitive without the financial resources of high-market teams like the Yankees and Red Sox. In turn, Beane and his staff revolutionized the way baseball statistics came to be interpreted. The film is an absolute must-see for any sports fan and will hopefully live up to the hype it has generated since the movie began pre-production more than two years ago.
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I am looking forward to seeing the movie if just because I have a strong historical connection to the A's. When I worked for the game industry, Tony LaRussa, at the time the Oakland A's manager was in our board of directors. We designed the game Tony LaRussa II which on the surface was "just a computer game" but the backend was a statistics engine that had data as far back as baseball data had been recorded, including exotic things like wind patterns at different stadiums, humidity and many other things that could alter even by a fraction of a point the characteristics of any one player,
Tony used our game as an actual management tool, and as you probably know they became national champions around that time.
I had the pleasure of being the first to utilize motion-capture for any game precisely for that title, so I was able to record the movements of each and everyone of the players. After that every game company and then film companies started using mo-cap which before it was considered a medical tool!
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