Moneyball (4/5 Stars)

The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

One of the main arguments I hear batted around for keeping steroids out of sports is that it makes the game unfair. And the usual retort I always bring up to everyone’s bafflement is that sports aren’t fair anyways, so what’s the difference? And they aren’t fair. They really aren’t. One of the hardest things to do in life is to distance oneself from mass delusions and the idea that sports are somehow fair is one of the most broadly accepted and thankfully rather benign fallacies around. Genetic differences (for instance height in basketball) between opponents are not fair. And neither is a system that allows one professional sports team to have a much bigger budget than others. That difference allows the richer team an unfair advantage in attracting top talent. That is what Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics in this movie based on a true story, must come to grips with. The movie starts with the Athletics coming off one of their best seasons and subsequently losing their three best players in free agency to richer teams like the Yankees. The experienced scouts around the back-room table are talking about rebuilding the team from the ground up with old baseball knowledge and old baseball customs, the same way they did it the last time. No, No, No, Billy says, we cannot do the same thing. More importantly, we cannot do the same old thing because the Yankees are doing the same out thing. If we scout the way the Yankees scout than we will lose because the Yankees will outbid us no matter how well we scout. The game is rigged. We either find a way to play the game differently or we lose. That is Billy Beane’s problem.

How Billy attempts to solve the problem is the main focus of “Moneyball.” Billy Beane, played here by Brad Pitt, essentially disregards most or all of the advice of his experienced scouts and starts listening to a young recent economics major from Yale named Peter Brand, played here by Jonah Hill. The chubby bespectacled Peter Brand is not an athlete, but he does know math and  can use it to spot trends. He tells Beane in confidence his hunch that scouts completely overlook certain things and place way to much emphasis on others. For instance, Peter suggests that a manager’s job shouldn’t be to buy players, but to buy wins, and to buy wins he needs to buy runs. Billy Beane follows this advice. This leads to some rather unorthodox moves, one of the more outrageous things being hiring a life-long catcher to play first base because the guy has a very good getting on first base percentage. Hopefully the runs he will score will offset the plenty of mistakes he will make on defense. The scouts think Beane is crazy. The team manager Art Shaw, played here by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, goes further and refuses to follow the directions. As he explains, he wants to play the team in a way that is defendable in job interviews next October. The A’s start the season with an 11 game losing streak. Beane’s job is on the line. If things don’t turn around he may never be hired as a general manager again.

All of this is very succinctly told with brevity and humor by a great screenplay written by Steve Zaillian and rewritten by Aaron Sorkin. It is impossible to tell which lines are whose but there are several scenes that come off just as well as all those scenes between computer nerds in last year’s “The Social Network.” In fact it can be said that the movies performs much better off the baseball diamond than on it. The backroom dialogue is filled to the brim with smart dialogue that explains things as if it knows what it is talking about. When Brand takes Beane aside and shows him videos of his “hero,” a pudgy little known baseball player who happens to get more walks than anybody but Barry Bonds, we understand exactly why that player is drastically underrated. We also understand why Billy Beane would be willing to take such chances. Through flashbacks we see a young Billy Beane being talked up by scouts who thought he would be the next big thing. They flashed him a huge paycheck and told Billy to skip college and go straight into the big leagues. Billy did and didn’t turn into anything big. The scouts didn’t know what they were talking about and in one of the best scenes in the movie; an older and wiser Billy takes on an especially irate veteran scout. “You don’t know. You say you know, but you don’t,” he tells him. No more of the confidence bullshit for Billy. He is going to trust math from now on. You know, that thing they tried teaching us in school.

This movie is especially satisfying for someone of my generation because we all grew up in the golden age of bullshit sports movies. All that “Just believe in yourself,” horseshit that adults think is okay to foist upon unsuspecting children were heaped onto us in movies like “The Mighty Ducks” and its many ripoff copies. But this movie tells it like it is. Confidence, such a cherished virtue, is shown to be the most useless and overrated of all skill sets. What really counts is doing actual work, crunching numbers, and using deductive reasoning. To show this is not an easy thing for a movie to accomplish. We are after all, an emotional species. But, by and large, “Moneyball,” accomplishes this task. Unfortunately it ultimately falls short due to the same pitfalls that beset everything it is trying to debunk. The last half of the movie veers into melodrama and misplaces an ending that should have been revelatory instead of muted.

What do I mean by that? Well, for one thing, the director Bennet Miller (last movie of his was “Capote,” way back when btw) uses way too much soft focus and slow motion in the climatic scenes. The idea of statistics is to cast clarity on a muddled world. A man like Beane, who has crunched the numbers, should be seeing things more clearly (think Neo finally seeing the matrix at the end of “The Matrix”). Instead, there is a five-ten minute scene near the end of the movie about a very meaningful game in which we see Beane in the weight room, fixed on the television, hoping to all hope that things turn out well on the field. This is not correct. A man who believes in math does not hope or pray for anything. They know what the probabilities are. When so-and-so comes up to the plate they know there is a certain percentage of chance that they will either hit the ball or not. They also know that there is a certain percentage of chance that the game will be won or lost. A man of math is not surprised. They are not brought to disbelieving elation or despair by the occasional impossible miracle. They knew it was possible actually, just unlikely.  Thus, we shouldn’t have out-of-focused shots. We instead should have full-focus shots. The movie should be set in a setting of hyper-awareness. This is not done to the movie’s detriment.

Now, take for instance the ending. It speaks boatloads of the very problem Beane was up against (i.e. human intuition against mathematical reality), but does not exploit it to dramatic effect. Billy Beane ends up turning down a very high offer to manage the Boston Red Sox. Now, if he were using his own philosophy, he would probably determine that access to the Red Sox would mean a greater budget, better players, and thus a better chance to win the World Series Title. In fact, the Red Sox would win the World Series just two years later having adopted some of Billy Beane’s methodology. But Billy didn’t join the Red Sox. He turned down the offer and stayed with the A’s….and he still hasn’t won the World Series. I’m sure the decision felt right though.