It’s perhaps fitting that Moneyball hit theaters the same week that the New York Yankees clinched the American League East. Once tagged by the rival Boston Red Sox as “The Evil Empire,” critics are quick to cite the team’s bloated payroll for its success. As suffering fans know only too well, money may buy the talent, but whether that talent will ultimately win the World Series is a huge gamble. Baseball is, essentially, a game of numbers, but how those numbers are interpreted sparks heated debate within and outside the sports arena.
And those debates get to the heart of Moneyball, first an absorbing book by Michael Lewis, and now an enjoyable movie starring Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, a former major league ball player who became general manager of the Oakland Athletics. As Lewis confesses in the beginning of the book, he was drawn in by the story of the Oakland A’s. a small market team that somehow managed consistently to win games and make it into the playoffs. In 2001, the A’s made it to the American League Division series, only to lose in the final game to—you guessed it—the New York Yankees. The film opens with the A’s experiencing this devastating loss, but when some numbers are flashed on the screen (the Yankee’s payroll was nearly $115 million, while the A’s was under $40 million), the Oakland team’s accomplishment is placed into context. How, we have to ask, did the team manage that?
By rethinking all those numbers. While the film picks up at the end of the 2001 season, Beane began in the 1990s to develop a new strategy for competing with the big market teams. In the 1970s, Bill James began to write baseball articles while a security guard at the Stockley Van Camp pork and beans cannery in Kansas. He used scientific analysis to conclude that teams were stressing the wrong statistics in how they selected and managed their players. (James’ approach is now called sabermetrics, after the Society for American Baseball Research). While most teams go after players with hefty batting averages and runs batted in (RBIs), Beane and his assistant (Paul DePodesta, a Harvard graduate in the book and Peter Brandt, a Yale graduate in the movie played by Jonah Hill), agreed with James that on base percentage (OBP) was the best way to judge a player’s worth. An early scene in the film shows Pitt facing the naysayers, a room filled with crusty scouts who have been trolling high school baseball fields and minor league parks looking for talent. There is near rebellion when Beane tells them they have been looking at the wrong statistics. Pitt and Hill are marvelous in this scene where they play off each other, Pitt pointing at Hill each time to reiterate the team’s new mantra: ”Get on base.”
While everyone is congratulating Beane on the team’s accomplishments, he’s not satisfied. In 2002, he wants to see his team go all the way, but the team’s owners are not inclined to beef up the payroll. Making Beane’s job even more challenging is the loss to free agency of three key players—Jason Giambi (New York Yankees), Johnny Damon (Boston Red Sox), and Jason Isringhausen (St.Louis Cardinals). Beane will have to go hunting for bargains, players that, for one reason or another, have been sent to the scrap heap by other teams.
One such player, Scott Hatteberg, played with delightful innocence by Chris Pratt, is astounded when Beane and Ron Washington (Brent Jennings) show up in his living room telling him to pack his bags. He’s now playing first base for the Oakland A’s. Hatteberg, who has always been a catcher, is both excited and terrified by this development. When David Justice (Stephen Bishop), one of the few high paid players on the A’s (half his $7 million salary is being paid by the Yankees) is told by Beane he needs to assume more of a mentor role, the aging superstar asks Hatteberg what scares him the most about playing first base. “That a ball will be hit to me,” he responds. “No, really,” Justice asks again. “Really,” Hatteberg repeats.
Moneyball is not just about the Oakland A’s. At its heart, the film is about Billy Beane and all young players who get on that sports treadmill early on and can’t jump off without hurting themselves. Beane had the talent, but not the drive to make it in pro ball. In the film, the failure is chalked up to Beane’s inability to hit. In the book, his story is more complicated. Awarded a full scholarship to Stanford, Beane wound up in the major leagues constantly second guessing his decision. That regret comes out in the film when he tells Brant he envies the young man’s Yale degree. (Beane also strongly believes in drafting college players rather than younger men still in high school who are ambivalent about their futures).
Moneyball is Beane’s story and the film is all Pitt. Rarely has he been this good, possibly because he has seldom had material this rich that doesn’t cast him as just a pretty face. He captures Beane’s range of moods—the caring father (there are touching moments with Kerris Dorsey, who plays his daughter, Casey), the tough negotiator, the sensitive employer (telling a player he’s been let go), and the nervous manager, (avoiding the ballpark when his team plays).
Hill is brilliant as Peter Brant, starting out as a fish out of water, an economics major espousing statistics about baseball, but ultimately finding solid ground as he and Beane watch their strategy begin to work. Philip Seymour Hoffman as A’s manager Art Howe turns up as a major obstacle to Beane’s plan. In the book, Howe comes off as little more than a figurehead in the dugout, with Beane calling the shots behind the scene. Hoffman’s Howe is not so easily beaten back and the scenes between him and Pitt provide much needed conflict and are fun to watch.
The film makes good use of actual sports footage, with the actors picking up the action in closeups. For baseball fans, it’s fun to see which players will be mentioned or, even better, be portrayed by actors in the film.
What would a sports film be without an upbeat ending? Moneyball delivers on this promise, dramatizing the team’s quest to win 20 consecutive games, a major league record.
Billy Beane remains as the A’s general manager. Before the credits roll, we learn he turned down a lucrative offer from the Boston Red Sox to stay in California. The A’s, however, have not returned to the World Series since 1990, and this year won’t make it to the playoffs. “If we win, this team will have changed the game,” Beane says. And he was right. With more teams now embracing the sabermetrics approach, Beane has, in some ways, helped to fashion his team’s demise. (The Red Sox credit that strategy for helping the team finally win the World Series in 2004).
None of what has happened since, however, can take away from what Beane and the A’s accomplished. The David vs. Goliath story never fails to please, and Moneyball will be pleasing audiences with this tale of the underdogs now and for baseball generations to come.
