Moneyball: Statistically Speaking… A Home Run

On October 15, 2001, Oakland Athletics GM, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), sits alone listening to the final moments of his team blowing a 2-0 series lead to the almighty New York Yankees on the radio.  A title card informs us that the payroll discrepancy between the Bronx Bombers and the Oakland Underdogs is somewhere in the neighborhood of $114 million vs. $39 million.  To say it's David vs. Goliath is flattery to the little guy with the slingshot.

It gets worse.  In the offseason, Beane's top 3 players – Johnny Damon, Jason Giambi and Jason Isringhausen – bolt for greener grass.  He needs more money to attract the talent to fill the void.  He might as well be Oliver Twist asking for more porridge.  Other GMs won't throw him a bone when it comes to trades either.  For some added salt in the wound, the team's manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), is asking for a contract extension.  A manager can't be expected to perform to the best of his abilities under the cloud of distrust that a one-year contract implies, after all.  Beane doesn't face an uphill battle so much as he faces his imminent professional destruction.  How should he go about replacing the ball players who jumped ship?

He shouldn't.  Instead, he should go about replacing the numbers those ball players racked up.  That's the mentality of Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a Yale economics graduate who adheres to the belief that scouts overvalue certain player traits and severely undervalue the statistics that truly matter – on base percentage (OBP), for instance.  The higher a player's OBP, the more likely his team is to score runs, and the more runs scored, the higher the likelihood the team wins.  These undervalued players come remarkably cheap and therefore, out are Damon and Giambi and in come Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), a catcher who needs to be taught how to play first base, Chad Bradford (Casey Bond), a pitcher overlooked because of his unusual form, and David Justice (Stephen Bishop), a 37-year old the Yankees wanted no part of.

Brand's mindset is nothing new, having been inspired by the work of statistician, Bill James.  Brand's mindset is also, unfortunately, nothing popular.  The old guard scouts claim that this approach spits in the face of all their hard work, not to mention over 100 years of "proven" methods and mindsets.  If Beane and Brand succeed, they'll have shaken the game of baseball to its core.  Not a bad prospect for the smallest payroll in the major leagues. 

On paper, Moneyball should be a complete disaster of a film with how much it focuses on statistics and backend dealings and how little it focuses on the actual game of baseball, but thankfully it's not. 

Screens of statistics fly by and discourses on theories frequently take place, but Moneyball is never boring and always moving because it's about so much more than just a game.  The conflicts of old school vs. new school and faith vs. doubt are ever-present and excellently weaved throughout the film, but neither of those threads would work nearly as effectively if not for the personal touch brought to the story through Billy Beane's narrative.

A former busted first-round draft pick, Beane has his own personal demons to exorcise through the team's success.  Typically, it might be a bit difficult to feel too much sympathy for a very handsome, likely very wealthy white guy, but by infusing the script with flashbacks to Beane's fall from being baseball's golden child, screenwriters Steven Zallian and Aaron Sorkin are able to funnel the story's stakes through a much more intimate and relatable perspective. 

Beane could not have been better cast either as Pitt plays the character with wonderful subtlety.  Beane's talk is sharp, but his smile is heavy, his eyes loaded with the constant struggle between belief in his new system and doubt over its 11-game losing streak.  Complimenting him is the toned down performance of Jonah Hill, who is able to generate healthy laughs during his banter with Pitt while still maintaining a serious air.  Much of that credit is undoubtedly due to Sorkin, whose trademark wit is noticeable without calling attention to itself. 

While we're on the topic of the screenwriters, Sorkin and Zallian deserve huge credit for taking an immensely complicated theory and translating it into vernacular that those of us who are neither baseball fans nor statisticians can understand.  Baseball fans may take issue with the exclusion and overlooking of certain facts and fans of Michael Lewis' source material may have quarrels with the creative liberties taken in the adaptation process, but you know what?  This is a film, a moving picture, an entirely separate medium, and it has its own rules by which to abide and it abides by them pretty damn well.