Vic Sage

m.e.t.b.o.t. considers metropolitan pitcher chris capuano's performance to be not particularly conducive towards winning. i would agree, but since the Mets had a losing record this year, i would suggest that this could be said of many of our regulars. But it's not our assignment to make a list of players whose play was conducive to winning, in absolute terms, but rather to rank this year's Mets players relative to each other (not to a theoretical construct called a "replacement player" that doesn't actually exist in our space-time continuum), about their relative contributions to THIS team, THIS year. And the notion that a guy who gave us 4 starts and 24 innings was the 15th biggest contributor to this year's team, while ignoring entirely a regular member of the rotation, who might be arguably ranked anywhere after Dickey among our starters, is just ludicrous. And if m.e.t.b.o.t generates ludicrous results, m.e.t.b.o.t should consider the scrap heap as a reasonable alternative. further evidence of this is that, so far, 5 forumites have listed their rankings and Capuano has been ranked 6th (twice), 7th, 9th and 13th (and i would concur on this 6-13 ranking range, as i've ranked him 11th below), while you've omitted him entirely (as well as a few other regulars, like Parnell and Byrdak). I think one needs to start with the guys that showed up and played, and then rank THOSE relative to each other, based on whatever reasonable criteria one can support, followed by guys who contributed in lesser roles. Obviously there is weighing of "greater contribution over a shorter period vs lesser contribution over a longer period" that goes on, but i still think one shouldn't diminish contributions by regulars because they fail to achieve some statistical (and purely theoretical) threshold. Yes, i was significantly less harmful to the Mets' chances of winning this season than Capuano was, but that doesn't put me among the top 30 Mets this year.

yeah, i just read a lot of words and still don't know what m.e.t.b.o.t. is talking about. the fact is that Capuano took the ball. Whoever you think a "replacement" level pitcher is, it isn't certain that they would give you 30+ starts and 180+ innings and a 4.5 ERA and a 11-12 record. We've certainly had worse #5 starters before. In fact, i'm not certain that Capuano wasn't better than Gee, Pelfrey and Niese this year. Was Capuano's production great? no. Good? meh. But somebody had to take the ball and the notion that Young's 4 starts and 24 innings added more value to the Mets 2011 season than Capuano's 31 starts and 186 innings just doesn't pass the sniff test. Maybe m.e.t.b.o.t. should invest in a nose instead of more gears.

Any methodology that dismisses 30+ starts and 180+ innings because the stat you've devised placed Capuano significantly behind a pitcher who gave the team 4 starts and 24 innings (Young at 15), needs to have its parameters questioned. By this logic, i was also more valuable to the Mets this year than Capuano, simply by not playing for them at all.

but Monk... it totally didn't have unicorns!

i just watched PUSH, with Chris Evans, which sets up a "HEROES" like cosmology with super-powered folks being rounded up and indoctrinated by the government. It definitely signals its intention to be a setup for a sequel, leaving the story unfinished. And it sucked enough for no sequel to be forthcoming.

Howard the Duck! and Ralph Bakshi's animated LORD OF THE RINGS... it ends right in the middle of the story, putting off the conclusion to a sequel that never got made.

i thought it was Okay, not great. i don't remember what my reservations/disappointments were exactly. Philip K Dick feature film adaptations to date: 2012 Total Recall (short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale") (remake, currently filming) 2011 The Adjustment Bureau (short story "Adjustment Team") 2010 Radio Free Albemuth (novel) 2007 Next (novel "The Golden Man") 2006 A Scanner Darkly (novel) 2003 Paycheck (short story) 2002 Minority Report (short story) 2001 Impostor (short story) 1995 Screamers (short story "Second Variety") 1992 Barjo (novel, "Confessions of a Crap Artist") {French} 1990 Total Recall (short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale") 1982 Blade Runner (novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") Top Tier: BLADERUNNER TOTAL RECALL MINORITY REPORT 2nd Tier: ADJUSTMENT BUREAU A SCANNER DARKLY SCREAMERS IMPOSTER Bottom Tier: PAYCHECK NEXT RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH BARJO

Yeah! I'm not sure why the author of this poll even included it as an option when it is so unequivocally wrong sorry Monk, but you just don't have WP's panache.

Edgy DC wrote: Two forumites gave it a 10? Really? I mean, Citizen Kane, The Battleship Potemkin, Ran, and Moneyball? I liked it plenty, but I'm not about to go knocking on my neighbor's doors to tell them they've got to go see it. this. i remember a typically vitriolic exchange with willets about grading movies, especially recent movies, with such unequivocally high ratings. Ah, WP. a nemesis to remember.

the last video game i played was PONG, but i liked it. i think it depends on your affection for Michael Serra. i like his film persona. others hate him.

At some points, as the tension mounts and the protagonist makes some terrible choices that expose her to bitter humiliation, I found myself reduced to some Three's Company-type embarrassment where I was physically moved to turn away from the screen or wipe my hands on my clothes, but I was committed to see it through.... This, absolutely. But... ..., and am glad I did. this, not quite so much. I think women will recognize the characters with the same sort of endearing embarrassment that men had for the characters in SuperBad... Yeah, but my wife absolutely hated it. And i totally hated SUPERBAD for much the same reasons. I don't find the characters' embarrassments, or mine for recognizing the emotional truthfulness of their unsympathetic behavior, particularly entertaining. Or even enlightening. These sorts of exercises are just sort of a wallow in our worst choices, as human beings. And i no more prefer to have my nose rubbed in how stupid, selfish, self-destructive, whiny and pathetic we can be as a species than my dog used to enjoy having my dad rub his face into the pee puddle he had left on the kitchen linoleum.

did that make it sound like i didn't like it? hmm. I did like it. I thought it had funny moments, and i liked Wiig and Maya Rudolph's relationship, and Melissa McCarthy is one strangely compelling actress.But i found Wiig's character really unsympathetic and whiny, so i wasn't rooting for her as hard as i needed to in order to LIKE IT like it, as the girls say.

gross out guy-bonding comedy meets chick flick for inconsistent results. Its like if THE VIEW had a bastard love child with THE HANGOVER and spawned a strangely sweet kid, surprisingly bright but with a personality disorder that caused her to fling feces around like a deranged chimp.

It was like they put that scene in the movie to try and let you think it was important and then took it back and said, 'No it's not. At all.' exactly. it was like "sports movie" revisionism. loved that.

RealityChuck wrote: So-so film. Competent, but not memorable in any way. yeah, but that's your take on Lumet's entire career.

*avi*

In an NL-only league with this many teams and this many slots to fill, premium players have the biggest impact, IMO. So many of us are filling out our daily lineups with part-timers and lousy players that 1 great player can make a huge difference. For MM, i think Ryan Braun's MVP-type season and the mid-season pickup of Bonafacio cemented his O, while Cliff Lee's Cy young candidacy validated MM's strategy to punt on saves. Knuxie took a cynical and smart all-Phillies approach that took him far... just not quite far enough. Hopefully, the actual Phillies will suffer a similar fate. SMG did it with smoke and mirrors. I'm still not sure why i didn't catch him, except my mid-season trade of Stanton for Marcum did not work out as well as i'd hoped, with Wright and Weeks not giving me the power i needed to make up for the loss of Stanton, and Marcum coming back to earth a little in the second half, not able to balance out my otherwise awful starting pitching. My team MVP is a toss up between Mike Morse, who had me nervous with his slow start and almost losing his slot in the Washington lineup before coming on to have the .300/30hr season i projected for him, and Bourn, with his .290/60sb/90r season. But the power ended up being way more important than the SBs, which were surprisingly easy to pick up off the waiver wire, so I'll go with Morse. my Cy Young was also my best waiver wire value, Ryan Vogelsong who had a strong season across the board after i picked him up for free in late april. My worst pitcher was a toss up between Brett Myers and Derek Lowe. Oh, i had worse pitchers, too, but these guys got more innings to be terrible than the rest did. my runner up for best waiver wire free pickup was Ryan Roberts, who gave me good HR/SB combo with multi-positional flexibility. My worst waiver pickup value was probably the $442 i spent on rookie Jose Altuve, when i was already far ahead in SBs. what the hell was THAT about? Best trade was Overbay+Jansen to MOOPS (neither of whom did much for him) for Leo Nunez, who gave me 36 saves, teaming with Brian Wilson to give me decent RP stats. But MOOPS got me back when i sent him a useful MI bat in Keppinger for Travis Wood, who did little for me before getting sent to the minors. In retrospect, giving up on Stanton to pick up Marcum smacked of desperation (as did the Keppinger/Wood deal, albeit less so), exacerbated by the lack of power i was getting from Wright and Weeks due to injuries. But i was kind of leery of Stanton's chronic injury problems, and thought he might fall off a cliff toward the end of the season. turned out he had a pretty strong finish and Marcum didn't. oh well. pitching envy will lead to such blunders. My best draft pick? Probably Morse, in the 9th round, followed by Bourn in the 7th. Nick Hundley in the 23rd also gave me surprisingly good value. My worst pick? All the others. My first 2 picks, Wright and Weeks, were decent but limited by injuries and not nearly as productive as you need your top 2 picks to be. Ian Desmond and G.Soto were decent for their positions, but i over-reached on them. I waited til the mid-rounds to get SPs (as i planned), but as it turns out, Brett Myers, Edison Volquez, Kyle McClellen and Derek Lowe do not a pitching staff make...even in this league. There were, however, good SPs available in those mid rounds and, if my top hitters had produced and i had picked better SPs (or had been luckier with them), i feel i would've been in it all season, instead of hovering in the 5th-6th place range most of the year until i was able to scramble to a 4th place finish. oh, well. wait'll next year...

There's a moment i love toward the end. the movie keeps its focus on the core story: the resistance to the team's construction, their early failures, and their turnaround, the run for the record before coming up short, and Beane's coming to terms with his own past. So it doesn't dramatize one of the great scenes in the book, where they prepare for the minor league draft. It would have stopped the story dead in in its tracks. Also, it would have repeated the earlier scene with the scouts, as they are arguing over what free agents to pursue, serving an identical function in the narrative. So i agree that it was not a scene the movie needed, or could even reasonably include. But they still found a way to reference it, while giving the movie a touching denoument. Beane is upset because they lost in the playoffs again, and so Brand/DePodesta shows him a clip of their fat catching prospect, Jeremy Brown (the one the book spent much time on, as the focus of the draft debate), as he plays a game in the minors. He gets a hit but is such a bad base runner, he falls down rounding first. What he didn't realize was he had hit a homerun. so he gets up, dusts himself off and rounds the bases. This is Brand/DePodesta's message to Beane: Billy, you fell down rounding first but what you don't realize is, you hit a home run. Boston offered to make you the highest paid GM in sports, other franchises will emulate what we've done here, we've changed the game. It reminds me of the end of CAMELOT, where Arthur is in despair about having to go to war against his best friend Lancelot, while the woman he loved has confined herself to a nunnery after betraying him. And there, on the eve of battle, he comes across a boy who wants to be a knight, inspired only by the stories he's heard about the nobility and principles of Arthur's roundtable. This boy, he realizes, is his real victory. And so he tells the boy to stay safe behind the lines, and grow up to retell the tales to his own children for, as long as that fair time is remembered, it may come again. The power of myth. It gets me every time. And so here, the knight thinks he has failed not realizing that, in lighting the darkness, he has already succeeded. "oh, but that's not what REALLY happened!" oh shut up.

based on what we saw of Howe in NY, i'd say Hoffman's portrayal of him is not the least unfair and probably accurate. It makes him out to be a quiet, calm, professional and unexceptional but competent manager who is doggedly determined not to buckle under to his GM's farfetched theories, since he's working on a 1-year deal and will need to find another organization to hire him some day. That he is, in the story's "moneyball" view, wrong-headed in his philosophy doesn't demean him, particularly, but mirrors can be so damned upsetting sometimes.

It may make for a nice tale, but it's not the real story of that team. like all good storytellers, they lie the truth and don't let facts get in the way.

not superfluous. his relationship to his ex-wife and daughter humanizes him, and gives him more of a reason to stay in Oakland (near her, rather than east coast). The daughter's song provides a funny and touching coda, as he listens to her sing about what a "loser" he is.

themetfairy wrote: Aaron Sorkin never lets the facts get in the way of a good story. The Moneyball principles were being used way before the 2002 season. And how can you tell the story of that season without acknowledging that the team had the 2000 Cy Young runner-up (Hudson), the 2001 Cy Young runner-up (Mulder), the 2002 Cy Young Award winner (Zito) and the 2002 MVP (Tejada)? That said, it was an entertaining film. first of all, Sorkin was the third writer brought in on the project, and really was brought in to punch up the dialogue more than structure the story. so the crack about sorkin is just factually incorrect. secondly, as Michael Lewis himself pointed out in an interview with Costas, the drafting of Hudson and Zito was as much due to a "moneyball" analysis as anything else in the story... they were hardly "can't miss" scouting wet dreams. But in any event, the story was about the players Beane decided to bring in that season and why. they weren't making a "Bull Durham" sports comedy about all the guys on the team. they were telling a story about an idea, a philosophy. which is a hard thing to do; they would've had a much easier time doing it almost any other way. so good on them.

Edgy DC wrote: Me neither, but Sage --- who was in fact championing this film years ago --- has. Sage has what?

here's the Lumet thread: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=15938 Treat Williams is great in this movie, one of Lumet's best. � Prince of the City (1981) � harkening back to the corrupt cops of his SERPICO days, this is another true crime adaptation with all kinds of complex notions of guilt and responsibility that had become a hallmark theme of his work by this time, with the complicated morality tale played out in naturalistic terms against Lumet�s beloved NYC backdrop. His 1st Oscar nom for writing, but no nom for directing? Boo!

A quiet, contemplative, deliberately paced movie with much to say, that avoids most (if not all) sports movie cliches. I liked it alot. And Pitt's perf as aging jock seemed pitch-perfect, working well off of goofball gone straight Jonah Hill. Just enough baseball to keep it a baseball movie and not a business movie. and it makes a folk hero out of Scott Hatteberg.