Movie Review: Moneyball

Perhaps no single work in the history of baseball changed the way fans relate to a sport than Moneyball, a book written by Michael Lewis almost 10 years ago now. Sure, there were a few fans who poured over stat pages looking for things other fans didn't see or care about, but they were few and far between. Before Moneyball, things like scouting and drafting, things General Managers oversee, were held to be the purview of only a select group of shaman's who had special insight into these things. GM's and scouts were the untouchable, unknowable prophets, seers and medicine men of sport. The rest of us could only stare at stat sheets and dream. Moneyball changed all that. It pierced that sacred bubble and allowed for the idea that you actually could scout players from a stat sheet. Add in the sudden ease with which you could find these stat pages on the internet, throw in the explosion of interest in fantasy baseball and you had a perfect storm. Suddenly millions of fans started to not only believe they could be GM's but that they probably knew more about how to identify good players than the GM of the team they root for! It was almost insanely empowering.

Moneyball, the movie, may well be a great way for a non-baseball fan to become better acquainted with the game and it's inner workings. For a fan who has literally lived through the changes that Moneyball brought to being a fan, well, you had to have a pretty strong feeling it would be anti-climactic long before you went to see it. I found Moneyball to be better than what I had anticipated, but then, I wasn't really expecting much.

The movie opens with the Oakland A's losing the final game of the 2001 ALDS to the New York Yankees followed by the realization that they would be losing their best player to those same Yankees for a price the A's could not afford to pay. GM Billy Beane realizes he can't compete with that disparity in financial resources by continuing to evaluate players in the same way all other GM's did. There's a fascinating confrontation with his scouting staff during which the scouts speak in scout speak: "The ball jumps off his bat." "He's a 5 tool player." "He has tremendous upside." "He has a great feel for the game." Billy asks them one question. "...But can he hit?" You see, Billy himself was once a 5 tool player and had heard all those same cliches about himself. The film flashes back to those days.

The scene moves to the offices of the Cleveland Indians where Billy tries to make a trade for Indians reliever Ricardo Rincon, a scene that likely never happened in real life. Beane notices that every time Indians GM Mark Shapiro seems to be about to agree on a deal, he glances over at a quiet fat kid standing by the door. Heads shake, gestures are made and Shapiro backs away from the deal. As a frustrated Billy walks out of Shapiro's office, he hunts down this fat kid in his cubicle and demands to know exactly what happened in there. The kid is frustrated himself. He walks out to the parking garage with Billy and pours his heart out. He explains how his statistical model contradicts what most GM's and scouts believe to be true about the game. He is looking for a chance to put his own theories to the test.

Beane gets back to Oakland and the first thing he does is hire the kid away from the Indians and makes him his Assistant GM, much to the annoyance of the scouts and his manager, Art Howe. Here the movie takes an almost Karate Kid turn with the fat kid(named in the movie Peter Brand, but actually a mashup of the real life Paul DePodesta and JP Ricciardi) playing the teacher and Beane playing the student. They emerge from this tutorial with a plan that the scouts and Howe absolutely hate. They will sign 3 undervalued players who all have an OBP of .360 or higher which they have determined mathematically will make up for the lost, much more expensive, players. Beane pays a late night visit to Scott Hatteberg in his home and in a touching scene offers to resurrect his career as a first baseman even though Hatteberg has never played first base and doesn't know if he can.

The start of the season brings a battle of wills between Beane and manager Art Howe over what players to put on the field. The theme is not unlike the battles internet Giants fans had this last year with Bruce Bochy and his lineups. Beane finally settles the argument by trading the players Howe was insisting on playing so he couldn't play them anymore! The climax of the movie was the historic 20 game winning streak and another playoff berth accomplished with the players Billy wanted on the field.

The movie should have ended there, in my opinion. The A's were eventually eliminated from the playoffs, this time by another small market team, the Minnesota Twins. Billy gets interviewed for and offered the GM job in Boston for many times the amount of money he could ever make in Oakland. There are some touching scenes between Billy and his daughter. There was a funny video clip of obese catching prospect Jeremy Brown rounding first base and diving back on a ball that was actually a home run, but otherwise had nothing at all to do with the story. There are a lot of scenes of Billy(Brad Pitt) sitting alone holding his head in his hands. The movie just loses momentum and focus in the last half hour and I started to get restless.

There is some Oscar buzz around Moneyball and Brad Pitt. I don't go to many movies these days, so don't have much to compare it to, but I would not give it any Oscar votes. The closest I would come to an Oscar nomination would be the fat dude who played the Assistant GM. He was great the whole way through. Brad Pitt did a good job of playing Billy Beane. He even almost made you forget he is Brad Pitt and think he is really Billy, but he's Brad Pitt after all and the dirctor just couldn't help himself from avoiding the poses and the cliched scenes of Pitt sitting alone holding his head in his hands.

Some fans of the book will be disappointed that the draft room scene is completely left out of the movie. Think about it though, there was really no way to include the draft room in the movie because the Moneyball draft did not really turn out all that well! Overall, I'd give the movie a marginal thumbs up. The first 3/4 was very good, though not great. The last 30 minutes were a drag and kind of ruined it for me.