The trailer encapsulates the movie and baseball's problem perfectly. How do small market teams compete with the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers? Well, Oakland's GM Billy Beane came up with a way. We'll get into the actual theory and practice of Moneyball this week but first the movie.
We've always been a big fan of Brad Pitt. We loved him as Rusty in the Oceans trilogy, cool and detached but with sensitivity and just a hint of dorkiness. We really loved Pitt in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. He plays Cliff Boothe as an old breed stuntman, a cowboy really. Boothe is a tough man in a rough land; a man with a code. In Moneyball, Brad Pitt manages to be Brad Pitt but without reminding us of his other characters. That is hard to do.
Jonah Hill plays amalgamation of Billy Beane's army of stat-heads reinventing the way we look at the game. He's a fat, nerd of a young man who can calculate an earned run average in his head. The late Phillip Seymour Hoffman is interesting as Oakland's veteran manager, Art Howe. He doesn't like Moneyball at all and lets Beane know it. The two man clash daily over the lineup.
Moneyball has a very conventional sports movie plot and executes it perfectly, but with twists at the end. The great social scientist and statistician Steve Sailer has noted that Moneyball isn't really a sports movie but a stats movie. This is an important distinction. Baseball is it's stats. Baseball stats tell us about a player's career with depth and detail available in no other sport. Moneyball argues baseball had been looking at the wrong stats, for decades, generations. Moneyball is right, but it is also wrong. We'll get into that in another post.
Overall we really like this movie. 3/4
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