Moneyball

As I sat in the movie theater and looked around at the audience before Moneyball began, a thought occurred to me: I think I might be the only guy who is here as a fan of Bennett Miller's previous film, Capote, and not as a fan of baseball.

You see, I'm not really a sports guy. I know the rules to all of the games, and I can follow them, but rarely do they hold my interest. I used to go to sporting events with my dad, of course, but my attention wandered a lot, especially during baseball. My only knowledge of baseball came from how much certain players' cards were worth. That was my version of Moneyball. And, you know what? Now that I think of it, that's not too different from how they played Moneyball in the movie.

Moneyball is the story of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the general manager of the woefully underbudgeted Oakland A's baseball team. The team is OK, but their best players are getting poached by rich teams like the Yankees. When Beane and his people are forced to put together a decent team for the next season, he is disillusioned by the way these old men are picking potential replacements. By their social lives, who they're dating, pure intuition. He realizes that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way these guys are playing the game.

On a trip to Cleveland to visit the Indians, Beane notices a young guy whispering advice to one of the manager types. Clearly his opinions are worth something. Beane approaches him to see what's up. He is Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a just-out-of-college economics major who has put a finger on the very thing that's been bothering him. These teams are buying stars, spending millions of dollars on home run hitters and guys with 100MPH fastballs. They should be constructing a team based on a million other things, but most importantly, the ability to get themselves on base. He has written a computer program reducing all of every players' stats down to one number to demonstrate this. Beane buys Peter Brand from the Indians and puts him to work as the new Assistant GM for the A's, where the two of them set out to prove that his algorithm works.

They're met with nothing but resistance on all fronts. His staff just balks at the pudgy nerdy kid who has suddenly rocketed past them in the ranks. They don't understand why he's picking over-the-hill players, players with weird pitches and permanent nerve damage in their arms, instead of picking out some good rookies on a hunch. The players don't understand what's going on either, though they're happy to be playing at all. The team's manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), is a particular thorn in Beane's side. Even when the team is constructed in the way Beane wants, Howe still refuses to utilize the players in the ways they're needed.

Previously, Beane had always kept himself a safe distance from everybody, not going to away games, not even watching the home games. The only way he can get Moneyball to work is if they're all on the same page, so Beane has to learn to engage with his team and employees. And when it finally does start working, nobody understands what is happening. When they're losing, Beane is the bad guy, and when they're winning, it's all because of Art Howe. At one point, a game announcer says "there's something random going on with this", which is ridiculous, because it's the exact opposite of random. Nowadays, 10 years later, every team plays baseball using Billy Beane and Peter Brand's methods. They changed the way the entire sport is played.

Brad Pitt is good as Billy Beane. He's a guy who, in his youth, was the victim of such blind prognostication by the baseball scouts, at their urging, turning away from a full-ride scholarship to pursue a sure-thing career as a superstar baseball player. When their assurances proved wrong and his career never took off, he stepped down and got a job as a scout, forever haunted by the choice he could have made. I wish he wasn't chewing and spitting tobacco through the whole movie. It's so gross to watch! But at least he wasn't making a game of spitting it on dogs and stuff, like The Outlaw Josey Wales did.

Jonah Hill is also pretty great as Peter Brand. He's been having a pretty good run with his last few movies, and this is probably the best he's been yet. There are a lot of funny moments where Peter Brand is reacting uncomfortably or awkwardly because he's a bit out of his depth. Even he questions whether they can get away with playing baseball by his method, and has to decide if he can commit 100% to what they're doing.

The filmmaking is quite good. I actually liked Moneyball better than Capote, although nobody in this gave quite as good a performance as Philip Seymour Hoffman did in that. The screenplay is credited to Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin. I can only assume they called Sorkin in after The Social Network came out, because he demonstrated his ability to write engaging dialogue of characters explaining potentially uninteresting subject matter to each other at length. I didn't actually know Sorkin was involved in this until I saw his name in the end credits, but I kept thinking about him through the whole movie, so his presence must have been felt.

Like any good baseball movie should be, Moneyball is earnest and optimistic, but unlike most of them, never gets too cloying or sentimental. I think you can also interpret it as being about America, too, which is another quality every baseball movie should have. In our current economic climate, there are hard times everywhere, with such a huge federal deficit, and with a whole bunch of crusty old dinosaurs running things in the same old way and resisting any new ideas. Like Billy Beane and the Oakland A's, maybe Bennett Miller intended Moneyball to double as a call for America to work together to find a way to change the way the entire game is played.