MoneyBall: The Man Beane

We really enjoyed Brad Pitt's portrayal of Oakland A's GM Billy Beane. The man is obsessed and focused, so much so that he won't even watch the games. Beane just can't take the stress. Heh, we're the same way about politics. When the Yankees bounce the A's out of the first round of the playoffs for the second year in a row, Beane is so frustrated he breaks his radio. We sympathize. Here's something else that really spoke to us. Beane looks back and regrets the way his pro-career panned out. He was a highly recruited prospect but didn't pan out. Beane is haunted by the decision and is racked by regrets. Maybe we all are, but man....talk about hitting the sweet spot.

Moneyball: The Inconvenient Fact

In Moneyball, Billy Beane is extremely frustrated when the New York Yankees defeat his Oakland Athletics in the first round of the playoffs. The Yankees knocked the A's out of the first round the year before as well. In both seasons the A's were a better team. They had more stars, more players in the their prime and more wins. Oakland hitters were to walk and swing for the fences. But the Yankees won because they're hitters  worked the count, walked, made productive outs and just had an uncanny ability to get clutch hits. When Yankee manager Joe Torre went to the bullpen, it was a death sentence.

Going into 2002 the Athletics lost three of their stars, including premier lefthanded hitter Jason Giambi, who left for the Yankees. Moneyball portrays this as an existential crisis for the Athletics but the film doesn't tell us that the A's still had two formidable sluggers, Chavez and Tejeda. More importantly the A's retained their three ace starting pitchers, Hudson, Mulder and Zito.

Moneyball casts the 2002 A's as a plucky underdog, but they still had the trio of starters and in fact won a 103 games that year. The small market Minnesota Twins bounced them in the first round of the playoffs. 

So much for moneyball.

Will's new Baseball Movie

So last week we finally saw Moneyball:

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