Moneyball is Back!

Recent trades for Yuniesky Betancourt (career 3.2 BB%) and Jeff Francoeur (career 4.9 BB%) may illustrate that not all of baseball has caught on to the ideas of Moneyball, but at least Sony still likes the project, the movie one that is.

Sony is still game on making the baseball pic "Moneyball," tapping Aaron Sorkin to polish an early script by Steve Zaillian.
[...]
But Sony is keeping hold of the project, and Sorkin's changes will be more in line with the version the studio favored all along, with the focus on Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane, who assembled a contending baseball club on a shoestring budget by employing a sophisticated computer-based analysis to draft players.

This seems like a good thing if you want the movie to be made, but maybe a bad thing if you wanted to watch an enjoyable movie. I was really excited for the idea of watching a cartooned Bill James and former players play themselves in the film, things that would be new to sports films. Now all I have to look forward to are lengthy intellectual lectures by Billy Beane about market inefficiencies and Paul DePodesta's computer, great.

Soderbergh's draft and production plans took a more documentary approach that the studio felt wouldn't cross over commercially with moviegoers.

So production thought Soderbergh's idea wouldn't sell well, fine, but will boring the audience to death while questioning their intelligence really be a better alternative? Once again, I'm glad it's still going to be made (or at least that it's not dead, yet), but I still wonder what could have been with a cartooned Bill James.