I'm beside myself about the Moneyball trailer:
- one of my favorite books of all time
- a team I've long had a soft spot for
- appreciate that they don't shy away from depicting his famous temper
- just gorgeous-looking (the trailer - lighting, prod values etc)
- ...and believable
- (...other than the fact that Jonah Hill would have to look like me in order to look less like DePodesta. Hm, I wonder why they fictionalized him)
- (...also wonder why they didn't make Brad Pitt's hair darker... would have been a very easy way to increase the resemblance 90%. I've never seen him look more like Brad Pitt and less like anyone else. -- maybe because it would have made it too obvious that Billy Beane is much better looking? Unlikely but that will be my working theory)
- they figured out a way to make it filmable after all. I guess if anyone would be able to find - or absent one, forcibly inject - a narrative thread, it'd be Sorkin
- seems promising that it will decently bring the funny

I REALLY hope they figure(d) out a way to get in my absolute favorite part: the very tickling (and touching! I do not mock: I couldn't field a ball if it were driven out to me on a velvet cushion on a golf cart seat) description of Jeremy Giambi's debut in LF:

The camera pans to left field. There stands Jeremy Giambi, shifting back and forth unhappily, like a man waiting for an unpleasant phone call. He must know that he is standing in a place where he faces almost certain public humiliation. Paul can guess what Jeremy is thinking: Please don't hit it to me. Perhaps also: If you do hit it to me, please be so kind as to hit it at me.

On the second pitch of the game, Alfonso Soriano doesn't. The Yankees' second baseman takes a fastball in the middle of the plate from A's pitcher Eric Hiljus and smacks it deep into left field. Jeremy Giambi makes his way frantically back toward the left field wall, like a postman trying to escape a mad dog. He is the slowest man on the slowest team in professional baseball. When he runs, he manages somehow at the same time to convey personal embarrassment. He is too busy right now to wonder why he is playing left field at all, but he well might. He is playing left field not because he has any particular gift for plucking balls from the air but because he is even more gloriously inept when faced with the task of picking them up off the ground. Jeremy Giambi is in left field, to be exact, because the most efficient distribution of the A's resources was to stick him there. Jeremy Giambi believes he has reached the wall before he does. He gropes the air behind him with his free hand, then he looks up. Somewhere in the night sky is a ball; where, apparently, he is unsure. He jumps, or, at any rate, simulates the act of jumping. The ball somehow flies under his glove and bangs off the wall for a double. ...

Although I can't find it anywhere online, I could've sworn that this chapter contained a passage about this same game (first pitch of the game, in fact, I thought) concerning a pop fly under which (I believe) Je. Giambi dashed about uncertainly and which "fell unmolested several feet behind him as he continued anxiously peering skyward", or similar. Maybe it was edited out of later editions for being too harsh on top of the above...

Sports movies, and especially baseball movies, of course never fail to remind me of B's incredulous reaction ("WHEN?!?") as we left The Rookie and several of us were still wiping away tears and complaining "STUPID MOVIE MAKING ME CRY OVER AND OVER". :D