Monday, January 9, 2012

It ain't over 'til it's over (or at least when the credits roll).

Baseball people, and that includes myself, are slow to change and accept new ideas.
--Branch Rickey

Late in Bennett Miller's Moneyball, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) asks Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), "How can you not be romantic about baseball?" That's true of course because it is the most revered of American sports. Football may have the most fervent fan base. Basketball may be the most globally popular. But baseball is still America's pastime. And in a lot of ways it still has a lot of trouble letting go of some of its traditions.



Beane is the General Manger of the Oakland Athletics. As such he is in charge of all personnel decisions: which players to sign and which coaches to hire and, perhaps more importantly, for how much. The film begins over footage of the best-of-5 2001 American League Divisional Series during which his A's had a 2-0 lead over the New York Yankees. The subsequent loss of that series would be bad enough, but the team ended up losing three of its most important players to teams in bigger markets with bigger payrolls. He complains that they're a "farm team for the Yankees".

When you're on the bottom, all bets are off, every option must be taken. "There are rich teams and there are poor teams, then there's fifty feet of crap, and then there's us," says Beane to his scouting staff. Baseball is like America. There's the 1%; the rich keep getting richer. He is determined to change their way of finding, signing, and paying players. Only, he doesn't exactly know how.

He finds his answer on a trip to the Cleveland Indians. While negotiating player trades with the Cleveland GM and his staff, he notices a young staffer whisper among the group, effectively rejecting one of Beane's offers. After the meeting he offers the young man, Peter Brand, a job on his own staff, pilfering him from the Indians in the same way A's players have been pilfered from him.

Turns out Brand follows the philosophy of Bill James, a pioneer of sabermetrics, which basically reduces players to a survey of statistics and places a certain amount of value on their contributions to a team's wins. "Your goal shouldn't be to buy players. Your goal should be to buy wins. In order to buy wins, you need to buys runs," Brand tells Beane. This flies in the face of old-school baseball thinking, a thinking still dominant among Beane's scouting staff and manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Brand's (and now Beane's) way of rebuilding the A's is not easily welcomed.

Now the decisions behind building a baseball team based on statistical analysis may sound drier than this sentence, but Moneyball was co-scripted by Aaron Sorkin, who made the litigation involving the founding of Facebook the stuff of high drama in The Social Network. And in the same way that earlier film wasn't ostensibly about Facebook, Moneyball is only in part about the sport itself.

Sports themselves already possess an inherent drama in a way that often doesn't lend itself to a fictional narrative. But whereas many lesser movies focus on the trite personal relationships between the athletes or coaches, teachers or management, Moneyball is smart enough to make it about the process of what Beane does, which is simply trying to build a winning team. It's as much a movie about business as it is about sports. The rest of the organization (frankly the rest of baseball) may like it or not, but Beane pushes his chips all in with the Moneyball philosophy.

The story of the 2002 Oakland Athletics isn't a secret--it's part of sports history now--but I won't reveal how the season plays out. You can look that up yourself, or better yet see the movie. And the legacy of Beane's Moneyball approach is still mixed. Teams since have won world series (and championships in other sports) adopting some of those philosophies and Bill James himself was hired by the Boston Red Sox the following season. Yet there are still the big market teams spending $200 million and winning world series. And it's likely they will continue to do so. But the spirit of challenging the status quo against all odds is part of the spirit of the American ethos. It's as fundamentally as, say, baseball.


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