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Recap / The Simpsons S22 E3: "MoneyBART"

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Lisa becomes Bart's Little League coach in order to expand her extracurricular activities, but Bart comes to hate it when Lisa begins sucking the fun out of baseball.


Tropes:

  • 10-Minute Retirement: Bart quitting the team at the end of the second act, only to return to the third after being told that winning is worth minor sacrifices, like withstanding a Jerkass leader.
  • As Himself: Los Angeles Angels manager Mike Scioscia, which marks his second appearance on the show, his first being "Homer at the Bat" 18 years previously. Apparently, he recovered wonderfully from his lethal radiation poisoning.
  • Awesomeness by Analysis: Lisa's ease with numbers turns the team into a winning machine. It went beyond just math or batting order, but would physically adjust the players stance to get the right hit.
  • Bait-and-Switch Comment: The radio announcer for the games when Bart comes to the plate:
    "Bart Simpson on deck. His bat's just hungering for a homer, like Kronos for his children. Speaking of homer, Bart's father's name is - you guessed it - not on my fact sheet."
  • Boring Yet Practical: Lisa uses math to lead the team to victory. Bart would rather be Awesome, but Impractical.
  • Call-Back: Marge recalls Mike Scioscia's radiation poisoning from "Homer at the Bat". Not only has he made a full recovery from radiation poisoning, it's also given him super managing abilites...and the ability to demagnetize credit cards.
  • Control Freak: Lisa becomes Drunk with Power and devolves into this as the episode goes. The Third-Act Misunderstanding happens because she kicks Bart off the team because he went against her orders and went for a home run (which he achieved, by the way) and Bart decides jumping out is better than taking Lisa's nagging anymore.
  • Didn't Think This Through: Any experienced baseball player would tell you that stealing home is extremely ill-advised except on a very wild pitch. Bart tries to steal home and predictably gets thrown out, losing the game.
  • Game of Nerds: Lisa is drawn to baseball by being introduced to Sabermetrics by Professor Frink.
  • Gargle Blaster: Homer has a new brand of his own which involves mixing vodka with mayonnaise.
  • Gender-Blender Name: When Bart accused Lisa of not understanding baseball, she brought up legendary baseball names of what she believed to be women (Terry Francona, Connie Mack). Nelson tells her those are men.
  • Instant Expert: Lisa goes from lacking the most basic knowledge of baseball (and confusing it with other sports) to gaining such an advanced understanding of the sport through Sabermetrics that she coaches an essentially unbeatable team.
  • Jerkass Has a Point: Lisa's decision to kick her own brother off the team for disregarding her coaching––immediately after he achieves a game-winning home run—goes over about as well as you'd expect. Having turned baseball into an exact science, she's convinced that his win was a fluke and that, being Bart, he'll blow the team's shot at the championship by continuing to flout her direction—and when he fills in for Ralph in the championship game, that's exactly what happens.
  • Jerk Jock: When Lisa tries to make the group look like the lovable underdog that no one wants to coach, Bart corrects her that they won most of their games last year (Boys of Bummer had beaten the team in the finals) and Nelson corrects her that they are the meanest team in the league, even harassing one of their best player out of the team because he was a ginger.
  • Know-Nothing Know-It-All: The aforementioned incident of Lisa claiming that women could coach baseball, using Terry Francona and Connie Mack as examples. Furthermore, as she brings wins to the team, she becomes more of a Control Freak, to the point that she makes the team study phonebook-sized team tactic books right before starting every game and pretty complicated board drawings on training sessions. The fact that the team is winning is the only reason why none of them follow Bart into quitting.
  • Mistaken for Misogynist: Lisa thinks Bart doesn't want her coaching his team because she's a girl. Bart retorts that it's because she doesn't know anything about baseball, which she doesn't.
  • Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Subverted: newly self-appointed coach Lisa (presumably having seen her share of sports movies) addresses the Isotots as this, only to learn that they're in fact the competent mean-kid team of their league.
  • Shout-Out: The episode title (and some plot details) is a homage to Money Ball.
  • Spiritual Antithesis: After a fashion, to the earlier Boys Of Bummer. On that episode, Bart losing a baseball game was the trigger to the whole town of Springfield to label him a loser and bully him into suicidal depression. On this episode, Bart losing the game (after learning that withstanding the team manager even if (s)he's a Jerkass is worth it for the sake of winning (and keeping families together)) by nearly stealing a home run makes Lisa understand that it's the passion of the game that counts over becoming a winning-obsessed Control Freak.
  • Technician Versus Performer: With Lisa on the "technician" spot (winning by the tactics analyzed thoroughly through sabermetrics, anything that deviates from them is unacceptable) and Bart on the "performer" spot (the typical "win or lose, the thrill of that Million to One Chance is what makes the game fun" Aesop).
  • Whole-Plot Reference: To Moneyball, it's even in the name. It deviates mostly in Bart dismantling the soulless nature of Lisa's number crunching.
  • Worth It: Nelson makes this comment after recalling that the Isotots bullied a perfectly good hitter off the team.
  • Wrong Genre Savvy: As the Isotots' new coach, Lisa mistakenly assumes she's in for something more in the vein of The Bad News Bears ("lovable loser" team, prejudice against female participants) before settling into the Moneyball groove.

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