See how baseball managers can do wonders through mathematical models – "Penalties Turn Gold" movie review

An inspirational sports movie about a baseball manager who tries to beat the crowd, selects baseball players based on mathematical theories, and then achieves impressive results. It seems that one sentence can summarize the whole movie, but it is far from simple. The charm of the movie lies in the conflict and the personality charm of the characters, and it is still recommended overall. (The best age to watch the movie is the crowd under thirty, don't ask why, ask is that age group and there is blood, haha.) ）

Roughly comb through the overall context of the movie: it began with the live broadcast of the owner Billy's Oakland Athletics team losing on the baseball field, Billy did not have the habit of watching live, and always felt that he would bring bad luck to the team. Therefore, when there is a game, in order to relieve their nervousness, they will go to the gym to divert their attention.

The defeat at the beginning of the film makes Billy restless, and the best players on his team are poached by opponents, and the boss does not have enough budget to let him rebuild a team that can win games. Although Billy is not willing, he still has to face the reality in the end, and the countermeasures proposed by the so-called experienced scouts do not effectively alleviate the difficulties they face.

Are players important? Players don't matter, what matters is that there is not enough money to buy good players. Are players important? It doesn't matter if the player is, what matters is whether the player can score or not. Billy is confronted with this contradictory scene until he meets his partner, Peter, a little fat man who graduated in yale economics not long after. Peter came up with a mathematical model theory that could screen out the most cost-effective players, which would help Billy solve his pressing needs, but all the scouts were full of distrust of the fledgling boy, but Billy knew it was worth a try.

Because the baseball manager position has absolute rights and is usually only responsible to the boss, others have no way to make decisions about Billy. That is to say, as long as the boss does not object, Billy is a character who can definitely walk sideways in the team. According to Peter's theoretical model, they found three suitable candidates, although each had obvious shortcomings. Even the baseball coach said he was incompetent, so he always rejected Billy's method of employing people. But the official level crushed people, and the coach could only respond verbally, but as the season began, the players' poor performance surprised everyone, and the coach had to consider his own way back, after all, he was only a one-year contract worker.

Coaches began to arrange players according to their own wishes, as a front-line employee, there is still some say. Billy had no way, in order to implement his own strategy, had to replace all the few remaining players in the team who could still play, and the coach was dumbfounded, and could only arrange the players according to Billy's requirements. It didn't matter, the team began to turn the tables against the wind, from the bottom of the beginning, all the way to the bottom, to win the record of 20 consecutive wins in baseball history. Although they did not win the championship in the end, the feasibility of the mathematical model has been proven. At the end of the movie, the owner of the Red Sox wants to poach Billy for a lot of money, but Billy does not leave the team because of money this time. (In fact, there is another branch line in the movie, which is Billy's situation as a baseball player when he was younger.) ）

In the film's closing text clip, the Red Sox also used billy's theories to eventually win the league championship. Although Billy's team has never been able to win the championship, it turns out that everything he has done has changed the mechanics of the entire baseball league, especially in the selection of baseball personnel. Like the pitch clip that Peter showed him at the end, a batter hit a home run without knowing it. And Billy, like that batsman, for the U.S. baseball industry, his behavior was a beautiful home run.

In the end, when I first watched this movie, I was not disappointed, but I felt that the director's path did not seem to have changed, in my opinion, "Penalty into Gold" and "The Trial of the Seven Gentlemen of Chicago" are all about a topic of change, and Billy's personality change in the movie is a point of view. Billy went from being reluctant to engage with the players and being reluctant to watch the game on the spot, to having to fight the fire himself. And the change occurred, starting from a self-service drink machine that needs to pay, this detail is still more impressive. Well, that's all there is to say, although there are still many things I want to say, but suddenly I don't want to write, haha.