There are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there’s “The Adrian Moment” digging into Moneyball, the film that asked: What if you could win the pennant with a spreadsheet and a gut full of frustration? Ocean Murff and Jim Pullen step up to the plate for a nine-inning dissection of baseball’s most disruptive underdog story—and somewhere in the process, they settle a few long-simmering scores (with the Mariners, with Dolphin Tale, with the entire notion of “managerial athleisure”).

This episode is the deep end of the sabermetric pool: payroll gaps, superstition lore, and the eternal heartbreak of rooting for a team that invents new ways to break your heart. Ocean, part pragmatist, part secret romantic, wants to believe in the Billy Beane revolution. Jim, a card-carrying Mariners fan and our resident stats nerd, mostly wants to know why his team is still waiting for the dance. Together, they go behind the curtain—sometimes gleefully, sometimes crankily—to ask: Did Moneyball ruin baseball or save it? Was Brad Pitt’s GM as good as his Achilles, his Tyler Durden, or… let’s just say, it’s better than Thelma & Louise but no Fight Club.

There are digressions—oh, there are digressions. Did the A’s 20-game win streak matter? Should managers wear suits or cleats? Is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s role here a “fart in the wind”? Should you ever, under any circumstances, compare Moneyball to Dolphin Tale? And most crucially: What’s the real metaphor behind a home run you didn’t know you hit? Ocean and Jim aren’t here to win the last game—they’re here for every weird, superstitious, data-driven, foul-ball-catching inning along the way.

If you love movies, sports, or just the sound of grown adults debating which Brad Pitt movie cracks the top ten, this one’s for you. And if you want the bonus content where the guys argue about actor filmographies until someone invokes Boogie Nights, you know where to find the membership link.

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Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more.

In 1919, eight men—some stars, some role players, all wearing the same crisp white uniform—made a decision that would rewrite the rules of American sports forever. In this episode of The Adrian Moment, Ocean Murff and Jim Pullen sit down with John Sayles’ 1988 film Eight Men Out, a dramatization of the Black Sox scandal, and find themselves caught in a dense web of baseball, economics, betrayal, and mythmaking.

But what if Shoeless Joe Jackson wasn’t the folk hero we make him out to be? What if these players weren’t victims of greedy owners and shady gamblers, but instead just a group of men who made a deeply human, deeply flawed choice? What if the real tragedy wasn’t that they were punished too harshly—but that they weren’t nearly clever enough in their deceit?

This is an episode about history, yes—but more than that, it’s about how we choose to remember. Ocean plays the skeptic, peeling away the mythos of Shoeless Joe and the halo around Buck Weaver. Jim plays the historian, a lover of the game trying to reconcile his boyhood baseball heroes with the adult realities of systemic corruption and personal failure. Along the way, they debate D.B. Sweeney’s acting choices, the legality of sports betting in 1919, and why Michael Rooker might be the perfect sleaze.

There’s a fight about Kevin Costner. A surprisingly heated discussion about catcher’s mitts. And a brilliantly meandering detour into whether White Men Can’t Jump qualifies as a sports gambling movie. This isn’t just about a film. It’s about what we talk about when we talk about baseball—and who we choose to forgive.

Because sometimes, the game isn’t just about wins and losses. Sometimes, the real story is the one we tell after the final inning.

Links & Notes

• Become a Member to get bonus episodes, deeper dives, and support the show.
• Join our Discord community to talk sports, movies, and the ones that got away.

Like, rate, review, and—most of all—share with someone who knows the difference between a real underdog and a Hollywood rewrite. See you on the court.

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Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more.

If You Build It, Will They Clap?

It’s hard to overstate what Hoosiers means to a certain breed of sports movie fan. But do Ocean and Jim buy the hype? This week, Ocean, making his rookie appearance with the film, and Jim, decades removed from his last viewing, take the full-court press to Indiana’s mythic hardwood, looking for answers in small-town dust and the echo of slow claps. Is this the David and Goliath story you remember, or just a fairy tale draped in team colors and nostalgia? Turns out, for all the talk of underdogs, the real Goliath here might be the memory of watching sports movies when you were a kid.

Ocean’s never seen the film—Jim practically grew up with it—and that split leads to a conversation about how Hoosiers lands (or doesn’t) in 2024. They dig into the oddities: Gene Hackman’s “perpetually 80” aura, Dennis Hopper’s perhaps-unnecessary Oscar-nominated town drunk, the inexplicable lack of credit for military service in small-town Indiana, and, yes, the slow clap—Hoosiers or Lucas, which came first? There’s real warmth for the film’s spirit of community and second chances, but also an honest accounting for the ways time, distance, and real-life history have left some of the “true story” on the cutting room floor. Ocean and Jim ask: when you strip away the mythology, what are you really rooting for? And is that enough?

If you’ve ever wondered why sports movies are less about the game and more about who’s sitting in the stands—or if you just want to argue about who invented the slow clap—this is your episode.

Links:

• Become a Member to get bonus episodes, deeper dives, and support the show.
• Join our Discord community to talk sports, movies, and the ones that got away.

Like, rate, review, and—most of all—share with someone who knows the difference between a real underdog and a Hollywood rewrite. See you on the court.

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Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more.