One of the odd things about Clint Eastwood’s new baseball drama, “Trouble With the Curve,” is how it aims to spite last year’s much superior baseball drama “Moneyball.”

The fictional “Curve” wants to repudiate the “sabermetrics” preached in the fact-based “Moneyball.” A smug young Atlanta Braves talent scout played by Matthew Lillard is sneered at because he wants to recruit players based on statistics culled via computer.

This prompts Gus Lobel, the organization’s senior scout played by Eastwood (emphasis on “senior”), to grouse, “Anybody who uses a computer to scout players doesn’t know a damn thing about this game.” He then chuckles and cracks a joke about “the Interwebs.”
What’s strange about this episode is that everyone reacts to Lillard’s character as if he were the first person in the history of major league baseball to bring a laptop to a meeting.