Every team has its highs and lows, frustration, heartbreak, greatness and confusion, but no other team is like this one. The Seattle Mariners are eminently lovable, profoundly human and stunningly, outrageously weird. There is no more fascinating team across the entire history of American sports.
Anyone reporting this as “not a movie” is a fucking narc and will die unhappy and alone
What has always made Bois such a special artist is that he understands numbers on a stat sheet as not merely the afterimage of sports narrative, something residual and entirely impressionistic. They ARE the narrative, or at least they can be. What makes this doc so brilliant, so compelling, so deeply moving is all in the numbers, how Bois and Rubenstein paper the walls of their digital space with graphs and lines and text, drawing out stories and characters in a way that, for a baseball neophyte like me, feels sort of like translating an alien language. The way they use newspaper clippings, too, is so unlike other sports documentaries. Rather than illustrating big story beats, they more often pick…
“Eminently lovable, profoundly human, and stunningly, outrageously weird.”
I never clicked with Moneyball when I saw it, not because I thought it was a poorly made film (if anything I was impressed that a boardroom, coach's office baseball movie was so propulsive) but because it made me realize, even as it broadly celebrated this fact, that baseball pioneered the phenomenon of the human being as algorithmic variable, of the millennia of philosophical debate over the nature of the self being completely overridden by a set of numbers that could somehow perfectly predict our behavior and outcomes, outcomes naturally to the profit of others. Moneyball sees Scott Hatteberg's walk-off homer as exhilarating proof that a gamble on math worked; I saw it as a psychologically merciless ission in the…
this is the best thing I have ever seen
a baseball documentary on youtube in which a camera drifts around a digital calendar looking at charts for 3 and a half hours almost made me cry multiple times. how does something like this even happen? sublime, emotional, comprehensive, profoundly human. unbelievable. I don't even like baseball. you must see this.
I don't know if this is the best movie of 2020 or not. I don't really know what 'best' means and I'm not sure if this is a movie or something else entirely.
I do know that, twenty years from now, when someone asks me to think back on this year in film, this is the first thing that I'm going to , the one that's going to best explain what it was like to be alive and watching movies in this plague-wasted time. A movie about pushing past wins and losses, heroes and pranksters, beyond history and numbers, to find meaning in the in-between spaces, the small moments in an overwhelming whole. It's the movie of the year.
Also, I believe the Mariners will win the world series in the next three years.
I’m going to kiss Ken Griffey Jr on the mouth
Never really cared about baseball in my life, and I think the only time I ever went to a baseball game was cuz I got free tickets for having good grades in middle school or something. Not that there's anything wrong with it, sports were just a world that didn't have much to do with my interests or upbringing.
Yet, somehow I sat through a near-four hour long documentary about, well, the history of the Seattle Mariners, a baseball team I knew nothing about before yet I now stan with every fibre of my being. That's the power of Jon Bois's work, a glorified powerpoint presentation that's nothing more than fancy charts and newspaper clips tacked on a calendar that…
Incredible to see this film projected in front of a sold out crowd of fans (of the Mariners and/or of Dorktown) despite it being, as Bois said preshow, optimized for viewing on an iPhone. Watching videos on YouTube is in most cases a solitary activity, and so is the way baseball is often consumed, at least in my house, where I’m usually resigned to watching the games alone in a dark corner of the house, or late at night after everyone else has gone to sleep. But while entertainment and iration can be solitary, fandom requires a crowd of fellow living, breathing humans laughing and applauding and groaning in unison at the absurdity of our shared world. Fly fly away.
Sometimes, you just need to go home
I have been trying to watch this documentary for a while and since I was going down to Seattle to watch the Jays take on the Mariners I felt that this was an opportune time.
So I have to say this is an amazing documentary filled with unique stories and angles with so many crazy stats. Spoiler alert the Mariners have never won a World Series but geez there is so much framing* here that you do feel that there must have been some cosmic kismet to make all of this align but really I think it comes down to Dorktown putting in so much work and piecing a grand story with so many connections that would make Charlie Kelly's…
