Friday, March 4

Reading--mostly research for play; rereading A Wife's Tale.

Seeing--Stephen Tobolowsky's Birthday Party; rewatched Holes with the boys.

CD--Moneyball

I find I am revisiting favorites in a way that I haven't done for years. For that matter, I could also have listed:
TV--the old Dick Van Dyke Show
I wonder if this is a function of the kids' growing up and giving me both free time (so that it doesn't feel like every second is so urgent) and a small but real sense of emptines (sending me seeking comfort in old pleasures). Virtually everything on this page is a re-watch, re-read, etc. And they have all yielded a lot of new pleasure and satisfaction on revisiting.

Anyway, I am getting through Moneyball with more momentum this time; it was very broken up last time. I think I will keep some of the arguments/lessons it presents, especially if I jot a few of them down. Overarching question is how can a relatively poor baseball team (Oakland) play competitively and even vanquish one (NYY) with three times as much to spend on players? Findings: there has traditionally been a lot of prejudice in scouting and drafting (against fat players, short players, players who don't LOOK good); there are inefficiencies in the market (closers are over-valued, for exampled); poor teams can do well if they buy tools piecemeal instead of looking for stars with 5, 4, 3 tools in one package; fans turn out in droves when their teams win, and nobodies become stars, so it's more important to build winning teams than to invest in stars; and most importantly, traditional baseball analysis has been looking at the wrong things. Bill James blazed the way for the most important skills to be assessed more accurately (and for statistical noise to be identified as such) and then, in his wake, a number of really brainy stats geeks articulated things even more finely. But Baseball ignored the new, good information in favor of what "everybody knows" except for Billy Beane (later followed by others).

Oh, I also stayed up last night watching all of Julianne Moore's Inside the Actors Studio interview. I think half of it belongs on the "re" list and half was new to me.