Enter Moneyball. Based on the 2003 Book of the same name written by Michael Lewis, the story follows the impressive exploits of Oakland A's General Manager Billy Beane, a failed former top prospect who turned his life around to become a successful front office executive by focusing on the lesser known and appreciated aspects of a baseball player, such as On Base Percentage, Walk Rate and emphasizing impact at bats. The movie, while not even close to being perfect, does take a fairly accurate spin on this story, though some timelines have been eschewed and a handful of scenes were left out of the movie, one of which was a very important reason behind the 2002 Oakland A's stunning success with such a minimal payroll. But as a movie, it's a solid, well written and well acted piece by both Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill that hopefully illuminated this trend in baseball to a new generation of moviegoers, regardless of how it has negatively impacted the game. But more on that later. Onto the movie...
Plot: Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) listens on repeat to the frustrating loss the Oakland A's had in the previous postseason against baseball's equivalent to Goliath in the New York Yankees. Despite building a solid and dangerous team, his lack of funds unfortunately prevented Beane from going all out on building the team to go to the World Series. To make matters worse, All Star players in First Baseman Jason Giambi, Center Fielder Johnny Damon and Relief Ace Jason Isringhausen have all elected to leave Oakland in Free Agency, limiting Oakland's ability to contend with the rest of the American League in 2002. After failing to acquire Cleveland Indian's ace reliever Ricardo Rincon, he encounters a Front Office "numbers" guy by the name of Peter Brand (Jonah Hill, but based on real life former MLB Exec Paul DePodesta), who convinces Beane that he has a chance to win with his extremely limited payroll if he focuses on stats that the rest of baseball ignores. Beane ultimately convinces Brand to jump ship after taking a look back at his own failed MLB Career with the New York Mets.
Billy faces fierce opposition to his ideas of team building from the likes of his scouting department and his team coaches, in particular Team Manager Art Howe (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), who doesn't gel well with his GM and believes he needed some job security after taking Oakland to two back to back playoff appearances. Billy and Brand ultimately choose to replace Giambi and Damon with three different players: aging slugger David Justice, party boy Jeremy Giambi and a former catcher who can no longer throw a baseball in Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), all of whom are considered worthless players by the old scouts but get on base at a solid enough clip to warrant them coming to Oakland (especially Justice, whom the Yankees would be paying the A's to take for next to nothing). Beane tries to put Hatteberg at First Base to replace Giambi, but his defense is abysmal and prompts Howe to ignore Beane and place rookie Carlos Pena there instead, leaving Hatteberg on the bench. Along with these players being brought in, the team also brought in reliever Chad Bradford, a pitcher with an extremely unusual delivery to replace Isringhausen.
The A's start out sluggish and are unable to keep up with the Seattle Mariners or the Anaheim Angels early on, with many openly criticizing Beane's decisions and the boy's club attitude of the team. With the club spiraling out of control and even his own daughter hearing about how he was hated by the people of Oakland, Beane and Brand intervene and start making serious changes to the club, trading both Carlos Pena and Jeremy Giambi in trades and getting on a personal basis with players like Justice and Hatteberg. The A's finally turn their season around and after prying Ricardo Rincon from the Indians, go on a run of winning 20 consecutive games (then an MLB Record) and easily cruise to winning the Division Title and going back to the playoffs. But once again, the Oakland A's are unable to win a playoff series as the Minnesota Twins stun them by beating them in five games and the Anaheim Angels ultimately win the World Series. Beane is frustrated that he once again failed and is approached by new Boston Red Sox owner John Henry about potentially leaving for Boston to be able to build a team to win with no financial restrictions. Beane is tempted to do so, but ultimately decides to stick it through in Oakland (where he remains to this day) while ultimately costing himself a chance at greatness as the Red Sox would eventually win the World Series 4 times over the next fifteen seasons.
What's Wrong?: As you would expect with any adaptation, there are a few things changed and edited to make this movie feature length. Beane's mentor and "sabermetric" pioneer Sandy Alderson is not present in any form in the movie, the Jonah Hill character takes up the role of several of Beane's front office gurus and not just one, as well as a handful of time lines and situations being changed out. These aren't dire. But one omission that is dire and could have truly made the film more interesting is the trio of aces that Oakland developed in this time. The Oakland A's had developed three great pitchers to compliment their solid offense, including Barry Zito, Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder. The movie doesn't even acknowledge these guys, even though Zito won the AL Cy Young award that season. Considering a baseball team would be nothing without a solid Pitching Rotation (looking at you, Mets), it's surprising to find the movie just completely bypassed these players like they didn't contribute much, especially when both Zito and Hudson were still pitching in the MLB by the time this movie came out in 2011 (Mulder was out due to years of injury).
When it comes to the acting, it's mostly good. Jonah Hill is one of those actors that you either love him or you hate him depending on the role. For example, he's a great comedic villain in Megamind, but he's a little too obnoxious in How to Train Your Dragon. In this, he plays the role of a nerdy and introverted statistician a little too over slanted, especially since we know how outgoing and extremely funny Hill can be. He's definitely not the worst part of this movie (that would be the neglect to mention the starters), but it can be a little grating considering how outgoing the real minds in Beane's FO were back in the day.
And, as a purest of Baseball myself, it would be unbecoming of me not to mention how this book (not so the movie) damaged baseball's reputation. A game that used to be wild and fun soon became calculated and boring. The stats mentioned in the movie and that continued to evolve deeper and deeper started to down dress Batting Average, Stolen Bases and other traditional statistics in favor of the more abstract ones. While some I will not miss much (Pitching stats like Wins or Saves that really don't factor in much), the drive to get more players who hit home runs and look for pitches has resulted in a dramatic uptick in strikeouts in the game of baseball as well as the game proceeding to get longer and longer to finish. Whereas games in the 1970s and 1980s would only reach 3 or more hours in special occasions, this became a normality by the time of this movie's release. With much less of an emphasis on contact hitting and speed (as Stolen Bases and Bunting are considered taboo in that they potentially surrender outs) and more of it being placed on unathletic players who just hit home runs and draw walks, the game has crawled down to a grinding halt because of it. This isn't Beane's fault directly, nor is it Sandy Alderson or Bill James's fault. However, when everyone is adopting the same formula for their teams (especially big market teams like the Red Sox, Yankees, Cubs and Mets). it becomes a chore to watch Baseball when it used to be fun to watch/play. Ironically enough, the 2002 Oakland A's lost out in the quest for a title to the most anti-Moneyball team in the American League in the 2002 Angels, who won using batting average, speed and elite defense at multiple positions as well as with timely hits. And this movie also lost out, finishing #2 at the Box Office in it's Opening Weekend to another traditional movie that people loved to watch happen, The Lion King. Yes. That Lion King.
What's Good?: Considering I tend to avoid a lot of his movies due to lack of interest in many of them, I forgot just how good of an actor Brad Pitt can be. He sells the frustrations and inadequacies that Beane has faced in his career remarkably well, while also displaying his ability to not only be a sweet talking dealer, but also a domineering figure on the team, with a bit of a comedic edge to him. My particularly favorite scene is when he fires one of the scouts who questions him and replaces him with a guy who's only experience of playing baseball was that he played Tee Ball for a game or two as a kid, making him the new head scout so long as he listened to Beane. I know that wasn't exactly how it went down, but it was funny to see this play out. He also has great chemistry with both Jonah Hill and Phillip Seymour Hoffman on screen and makes the situation all the more realistic and believable. I might have to start watching more of his work, because he did a really good job in this movie.
I also appreciate that we have a baseball movie that legitimately knows what it's talking about with it's source material. It delves into Michael Lewis's book without making it too science and numbers related. It helps a modern and probably not educated audience see that there are alternative ways to win. And while I will always prefer teams that play hard defense, steal bases and are great at making contact (hence why the Mets losing in the 2015 World Series doesn't hurt me as much), I can respect the Oakland A's for what they've done and what they have done when they are at a clear disadvantage when compared to other powerhouse teams like the Yankees or Dodgers.
Overall: This flick is probably the best non-biographical baseball movie out there. It has solid acting, knows what it's talking about and is written brilliantly to convey otherwise too abundant a numbers game to a less interested audience. Does it miss out on things? Obviously. Does it's source material have a good amount to blame for the current state of baseball? Oh yeah. But that isn't the fault of this movie. This movie does it's job well and gives us some good actors to get through it very well. I recommend watching, but make sure you know the facts before you go in.
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