Movie Review: Moneyball

Sometime in the past year I wrote a blog review of this book by Michael Lewis but I can't find it now. Maybe I just imagined I wrote it.  I know I didn't read it, but I did listen to it while driving across the country from Texas to California, or the other way, west to east.  Can't keep all those journeys straight.

But I digress.  The book "Moneyball" is as much about the science of baseball statistics and how different statistics can (and possibly should) affect which players a team buys as it is about baseball itself.  Lewis presents the statistical theory created by a guy named Bill Jones and gives the reader a lot of analytic information about various baseball statistics.  It is a different way of picking a team.  Instead of picking the players with the most hits, for example, a team owner might pick a guy who had the most walks because that will, statistically, mean more runs. 

The movie zooms in on the first general manager to use this theory, Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics.  Without a big enough budget to compete with teams like the New York Yankees, Beane knew he had to find some way to buy good players for cheap money, which meant players no one else really wanted.  With the help of an economic graduate, Beane begins to see how sabermetrics (the name given to this specialized analysis) could help him get those players and turn the team into a winning dynamo.  While it worked, it didn't work well enough in the beginning to get the Oakland A's to the world championship, but other teams have used this approach and had great success.

All the above is just a short summary of the mathematical theme behind this story.  The movie does give an overview of how this differs from the classical approach to hiring baseball players, but the movie is really about the A's and Billy Beane and ultimately, about baseball.  With a great deal of stock footage we get the back story on the A's and the story of their incredible turn-around in the 2002 season, going from one of the most losing teams to setting a record later in the season for the most consecutive wins:  20 in a row!  It's a good story about baseball and how sometimes, even in a sport as deeply steeped in tradition as baseball is, someone has to come along and shake things up.

Brad Pitt is good as Billy Beane. He isn't suppose to be pretty and he isn't.  (But still, quite nice to look at.)  Beane has weak people skills but razor sharp baseball intuition and an incredible knowledge base about the sport. Pitt plays him well, not making him warm and cute but driven and still vulnerable.  I could have done with less chewing tobacco and less spitting in the cup, but that's a minor quibble.  When you read the book, you have no idea how they can turn it into a movie because there is little action, just a lot of talk about action. The movie skips the talk (for the most part) and gives us the baseball action.  It has a good supporting cast, although the family bits certainly aren't necessary.  For a movie that just focuses on one team in a small part of one season, it is not slow, it doesn't lag and it has some real-life sport suspense as well.  Check it out, now on DVD.  It's a very nice way to spend a couple of hours, especially now, in off-season.

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