Adapted from Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003), the 2011 film Moneyball, directed by Bennett Miller, traces the powerful influence of sabermetrics, the empirical analysis of statistics, on baseball by following the fortunes of the Oakland Athletics during a period in which general manager Billy Beane tests the theory held by economics graduate Peter Brand that on-base percentage is a more reliable predictor of player success than batting average or scout evaluations. Brand’s theory, adopted from Bill James, relied a good deal on statistical evidence managed by computer programming, and Beane utilized these metrics to determine which players to sign and where to play them. Moneyball is a sports story that references technology, innovation, and religious faith as key American values. The volumes under review similarly trace the development of mobile technologies, telegraphy and other communication systems, and the postal system and characterize...
Telegraphies: Indigeneity, Identity, and Nation in America’s Nineteenth-Century Virtual Realm
Modernizing Solitude: The Networked Individual in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain’s America
Carol Colatrella is professor of literature; codirector of the Center for the Study of Women, Science, and Technology; and associate dean for graduate studies and faculty development at Georgia Institute of Technology. She has published Evolution, Sacrifice, and Narrative: Balzac, Zola, and Faulkner (1990); Literature and Moral Reform: Melville and the Discipline of Reading (2002); and Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science, and Technology (2011), and she has edited Technology and Humanity (2012) and coedited (with Joseph Alkana) Cohesion and Dissent in America (1994), essays written to honor Sacvan Bercovitch.
Carol Colatrella; Telegraphies: Indigeneity, Identity, and Nation in America’s Nineteenth-Century Virtual Realm
Modernizing Solitude: The Networked Individual in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain’s America. American Literature 1 September 2021; 93 (3): 525–528. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361307
Download citation file:
Advertisement
