I'm not finding a lot of Pirates-related stuff today, but I thought the news that Royce Clayton will play Miguel Tejada in the Moneyball movie was pretty funny:
Miguel Tejada, one of the Oakland players featured in the movie, was born and raised in the Dominican Republic. For the role of Tejada, the filmmakers cast Royce Clayton, a Burbank, Calif., native who grew up in Inglewood and speaks just enough Spanish to be dangerous ...
Then came the biggest challenge: How to play Tejada with the requisite authenticity. Clayton poured himself into the part, and spent several weeks cultivating a Spanish accent in an attempt to make the character believable.
Clayton, you might recall, is actually portrayed in the movie The Rookie, as one of the guys Jim Morris strikes out. But he isn't actually in it:
I didn’t know what was harder to believe, that scouts would make a pitcher throw in the pouring rain, or that the drenched pitcher could actually bring it at 98 while pushing off the muddy mound. Since when does a pitcher eschew warmup pitches, as Quaid does? Why does he always throw from the stretch? How come the cute and savvy son asks on the night of the callup, "What’s a Devil Ray?" And in the climactic scene, couldn’t they get Royce Clayton to play Royce Clayton? (What good is the power of Disney if the director can’t say, "Get me Royce Clayton!")
Jerry Crasnick writes in the article in the first link that Clayton was actually on the set.
Anyway, am I the only one who feels faintly embarrassed that a Moneyball movie is coming out? It was a great book, for sure, but the stuff in there is so 2003. The A's have had four straight losing seasons, and while a lot of the stuff Billy Beane believed has been proven right, his player-development ideas have been a lot more important, and he hasn't done well on that front - although, to be fair, he hasn't had good draft positions because he won all the time in the early part of the decade. His peers from the early part of the 2000s have mostly been replaced with people who are just as numbers-savvy as he is. The Moneyball era was a fun little historical moment, but it's over now, and the guy at the center of it is now struggling to do his job.