MONEYBALL AND STORYTELLING.

MONEYBALL AND STORYTELLING. I have posted several times on MONEYBALL, the book by Michael Lewis. The movie of MONEYBALL has now opened to generally favorable reviews. The reviewers who seem to be the harshest critics are sportswriters, who point out inaccuracies and argue that the book overly simplifies the impact of sabermetrics (statistics) on baseball in the last few years. I think that the criticisms underrate the achievement of MONEYBALL in successfully dramatizing—by simplifying—an unusual subject. Fiction writers generally avoid dealing with the world of work and business. Lewis not only dramatizes the overall story, but he finds the stories in individual incidents (I posted here about his exaggerating the story of one baseball trade for dramatic effect). The screenwriters of Moneyball have evidently had the same success.