Like many people, I was somewhat skeptical when I heard that Moneyball was being made into a movie. How would a largely intellectual discussion about baseball statistics make a compelling story on screen? It didn't really seem like the kind of book that would translate that well as it is mainly a story about ideas rather than human drama. Compare that to another Michael Lewis book turned into film, The Blindside, which tells the inspiring true story of a young football player. As someone who's read Moneyball and followed the Oakland Athletics during this time, I wondered how they would handle the story. Would it be a feel good underdog sports movie? Would it be a character driven story of Billy Beane? Or would it stick true to its roots and present a calculated look at baseball statistics and the business of baseball? Short answer, a little bit of everything. What results is a surprisingly rich story that integrates as much as it can from the book while taking liberties to ensure it make a compelling film.
Moneyball is a sports movie that isn't really about sports. It is a movie about moral victories, about how one measures success and failure, seeing value in others and ultimately yourself, and mostly about one man's drive to change perception and challenge the status quo. Billy Beane was once a highly touted prospect possessing all the abilities that baseball scouts drooled over. He could run, field, throw, hit for power and hit for average, a rare five tool player. He ended up being a huge bust, never living up to his expectations. After ending his playing career with the Oakland A's in 1989, he decided to become a scout and quickly worked his way up the ladder; by 1998 he was the general manager of the entire team. It is his own failures as a ball player that cause him to doubt the conventional wisdom of baseball analysis.
The film opens with the small market A's being eliminated from the 2001 playoffs at the hands of big market Yankees. As anybody who's read the book knows, the story doesn't focus on the games being played on the field, but rather the battle behind the scenes. It is not a game of bats and balls, but a game of money. How are the $38 million Athletics supposed to compete with the $140 million Yankees? It is a question that Billy Beane must face in the difficult offseason ahead. After losing key players to free agency, Beane, with the help of his geeky assistant Peter Brand, must construct a team of undervalued players, castaways from other teams, "like an island of misfit toys."
The struggle of the film revolves around what Beane and Brand are trying to do in opposition of what traditional baseball people think. Jonah Hill is perfectly cast in his role as Brand, who is loosely based on Paul DePodesta, Beane's assistant GM at the time. He is portrayed as a chubby soft spoken geek who's never played the game of baseball. What could he possibly know that baseball people who've been around the game their entire lives didn't?
Growing up, I was fascinated with baseball statistics and what they told me about a player. Just by looking at the numbers on the back of a baseball card I could imagine the picture on the front. 40 home runs and 100 RBI meant a big powerful first baseman. 40 steals meant a small but speedy guy. 20 wins for a pitcher meant he was an ace. It is basic statistics like these that people have been using for a hundred years to evaluate players. But just because an idea has been in place for a long time doesn't necessarily mean it's right. If that was the case, then wouldn't the world still be flat? In the past twenty years or so, advanced statistics that do a better job in capturing a player's ability have been developed, not by former players or life long scouts, but by baseball outsiders like Peter Brand in the movie, like Bill James in real life. There has been an ongoing struggle within the baseball community between sabermetricians and baseball insiders stuck in their old way of thinking. As Billy Beane says to one of his scouts, "Adapt or die."
That is at the heart of Moneyball, one man's quest to challenge conventional wisdom, to change the way people think, more so than actually winning baseball games. Towards the end of the film, Beane confides to Brand that he isn't in it for the money, or even for a ring, but to do something impacting and meaningful in the game that he loves. The film does a great job in capturing this sentiment in Billy Beane's character. Brad Pitt portrays him as deeply passionate but quietly reflective and does a pretty good job in capturing Beane's essence. Particularly effective are more personal scenes added to the screenplay between him and his daughter. Like any good sports movie, you have to care about the characters before you can care about the games.
And what of the games? There are actually very few scenes of baseball being played. Aside from the climatic ending, we don't really ever get into a game. There are no dramatic come from behind victories or perfect games, just clips of random scenes here and there, which seems appropriate since Billy Beane never watches the games himself. Moneyball is more about the behind the scenes look of a ball club, the daily interactions in the clubhouse between the players, coaches, scouts and managers which the film captures pretty well.
I liked Moneyball because I am familiar with the story and the team and I love baseball. I wonder though how someone with no interest in baseball, let alone baseball statistics, would view the movie. It is a sort of niched drama masquerading as a sports movie. Would other people find it as interesting as I did? I don't know about that, but I will say that movie is well made and smartly written. I actually have seen Billy Beane and heard him speak. Brad Pitt doesn't look like him at all and it's strange watching such a big star play such a seemingly unimportant (in the grand scheme of things) person. It works though I guess. Even after watching it and writing about it, I'm still not sure how much I really enjoyed the movie itself. It is hard to differentiate between the book, my experiences watching the team and watching this movie. It all sort of rolls into one. I still feel like it is a really hard subject matter for a film, but for the most part I think it delivers.
Grade: B
Note: The film does take a lot of liberties with the facts. For instance, even despite losing Giambi, Damon and Izzy, this team was still loaded with talent. To call this an underdog team is a bit of an overstatement as the 2002 A's were still projected to do pretty well. Yes they brought in a couple guys, but the success of the team wasn't built around them, it was from the home grown talent they already had in Tejada, Chavez and the Big Three (Hudson, Mulder, and Zito), who were conspicuously missing from the film.
I found it somewhat strange that there were a lot of scenes discussing things with scouts and the draft is never once brought up. The A's success during that time was in their homegrown talent that they drafted and the book discussed the draft process in great detail. I understand why they cut it out though since the movie is really only about the 2002 season.
In the film the Peter Brand character, essentially Paul DePodesta, introduces Billy Beane to the advanced statistics and joins the team after the 2001 season. In reality, Beane was already reading up on Bill James stuff in the 90's and DePodesta was already the assistant GM of the team by 1999.
Final note: I really like Scott Hatteberg. I was fortunate enough to have dinner with him one day along with Tim Hudson. They were really nice guys, so it was fun watching Hatty's character have a nice role on screen.
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