Moneyball

by Joseph Pisano

Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill as Billy Beane and Peter Brand

In the 1970s, Bill James, an army veteran from Mayetta, Kansas, who once made ends meet by working as a security guard at a pork-and-beans cannery, began shaping his life into a modern-day Horatio Alger tale, turning a passionate twin love for baseball and statistical analysis into the unlikeliest of notable sports careers, one that has taken him from Midwestern obscurity to the front office of the Boston Red Sox, and possibly some day to Cooperstown. Using statistics to discern player ability—batting average, home runs, runs batted in, earned run average—has always been one of baseball’s salient joys, allowing for intergenerational comparisons of all-time greats that often ignite heated fan debates: was Mickey Mantle a better hitter than Albert Pujols? Would you rather have Honus Wagner or Frank Thomas batting cleanup? As a postseason starting pitcher, was Pedro Martinez more lights-out than Sandy Koufax? And so on.

Of course, given his interests, James enjoyed engaging these types of questions, too, but he thought the numbers traditionally bandied around to argue individual superiority presented, at best, a skewed picture, which—when it came to answering the essential performance question: who deserves the most credit for team wins?—often unfairly assessed a player’s influence over a game’s end result, especially if the player’s contribution was something insipidly valuable like taking a bunch of walks. To root out this unfairness, James and a growing community of fellow numbers-crunching diehards progressively developed more telling statistics, based on increasingly complex formulas. After a few decades of laboring in the shadows for a cult following, their efforts finally drew the attention of Major League Baseball owners and executives tired of paying a premium for lackluster won/lost records.

At a time when a lot of smart, working-class Americans are unemployed or settling for dead-end, low-wage jobs, James’s life story—a resounding success despite the improbable social odds—would seem tailor-made for the big screen, exploiting the medium for what it can do so well: offer a bit of inspiration and hope to the dispirited. But today’s Hollywood does not venerate ex-security-guard eggheads whose physical appearance, when it comes to potential casting choices, suggests, at best, a bearded Ned Beatty. What Hollywood prefers instead are heroes Brad Pitt can portray and, so, on that score, here comes the film Moneyball, culled from Michael Lewis’s seminal nonfiction sports book about the early-Aughts transformation of the Oakland Athletics from an organization that statistically evaluated players the old-fashioned way to one that saw player potential through a Jamesian lens.

Spurring the change, and not afraid to draw blood, was Athletics general manager Billy Beane whose small-market team, in 2001, put together a 102-win campaign, but, in the subsequent off-season, lost several talented free-agent players to rivals with far deeper pockets, the most grating departure being star first baseman Jason Giambi (Nick Porrazzo) to the bête noire of professional baseball, the New York Yankees, who had just squelched the Athletics’ World Series dreams in a memorable five-game playoff series. Beane, boyishly prepossessing even as a middle-aged wheeler-dealer, is the type of inveterate charmer born to give actors of limited range like Pitt a legitimate chance at winning an Academy Award in a mediocre biopic (à la Sandra Bullock as Leigh Anne Tuohy in another Michael Lewis bestseller-turned-schmaltz-athon, The Blind Side). With screenwriters Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian and director Bennett Miller driving the pathos train, Pitt tries to pull off the class-bending trick of making a guy with a dream job—the kind that combines money, power, and personal fulfillment—a figure of Sisyphean sympathy, despite the glaring detail that Beane had a relatively clear path on his trip to the mountaintop.

Self-taught baseball stats guru Bill James

To accomplish this narrative feat, the filmmakers elide Beane’s privileged status by giving his struggle mythic proportions, branding him as the fair-haired transgressor against a calcified sporting culture with a status quo maintained by that most dastardly of arch nemeses: the baseball scout. Through portentous flashbacks, we learn that the national pastime’s cigar-chomping minions began tormenting Beane as a wide-eyed teenager, when the New York Mets selected the California high-school phenom in the first round of the 1980 Major League Baseball draft, offering him a $125,000 signing bonus to join their farm system, and thus forgo an athletic scholarship to Stanford University. Unlike the vast majority of drafted prospects, Beane eventually did make it to “the show,” but, unfortunately, he was not good enough to distinguish himself. Bitterly frustrated, Beane gave up his playing career after appearing in 148 major-league games spread over six unproductive seasons, ultimately trading in his uniform and cleats for collared shirts and sensible shoes.

Despite his financial windfall, not to mention the opportunity to step foot on the same home outfield grass that Willie Mays once defended, Beane apparently never forgave the scouts who incorrectly pegged him as a special talent and lured him from Stanford’s scholastic bosom with wads of lucre. Carrying this simmering animosity to Oakland’s front office, Beane sought revenge against the scouting profession, ungratefully forgetting that, in fact, those cigar-chompers had opened the door to his livelihood. In castigating scouts as baseball’s foremost enemies of reason, both Moneyball the book and Moneyball the movie essentially depict Beane as the boardroom equivalent of Galileo Galilei, with the Athletics scouts—in the movie looking as if they smell of Schlitz and Aqua Velva—seemingly poised to direct a pitching machine at Beane’s head the next time he mentions on-base percentage. Obviously, however, it is difficult to take the scouts’ villainy too seriously, since their supposed victim can fire them at any moment.

 When it comes to mainstream entertainment, nobody fetishizes higher education as fervidly as Sorkin (The West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, The Social Network), and since baseball scouts are not known for singing college fight songs, there was never much doubt that Sorkin would treat them with the same disdain Lewis did. Therefore, although the movie purports to value complex thinking, it falls into the trap of coding its characters in the starkest terms possible: Beane and his Yale-educated assistant general manager Peter Brand (Jonah Hill, as someone who, for legal reasons, technically is a fictional composite) might as well have worn mortarboards, while the movie’s recalcitrant scouts and gruff field manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) should have donned dunce caps. Showing more than a smidgen of elitism, what neither Sorkin nor Lewis, nor anyone else responsible for the film cares to ponder, is whether Beane, his dismissive smirk always at the ready, was just a bad executive, unwilling or unable to sell a new organizational philosophy to his scouts and Howe, who, on the heels of two consecutive division championships, were reasonably wary of wholesale upheaval.

In line with Beane’s supercilious example, the filmmakers see fit to treat their audience, presumably mostly baseball fans, like a pack of mouth-breathing dunderheads, flashing divinely lit close-ups of stat sheets across the screen, but never bothering to explain what any of the calculations mean. After a few of these condescendingly pointless shots, one wonders if Miller had to restrain himself from merely substituting title cards that read, “Smart people figuring stuff out.” Eventually, though, the film ends up hoisting itself on its own arrogance, allowing Beane, a knee-jerk contrarian, to run off at the mouth; for example, to justify signing Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), a stone-handed first baseman with a good batting eye, Beane asserts that defense does not matter, a somewhat fashionable opinion when Moneyball was first published nearly a decade ago. Now, this inane contention is rightly seen for what it was: a simplistic use of statistics.

A Wharton School of Business case study masquerading as a baseball movie, Moneyball becomes truly groan-inducing when Beane starts spouting Social Darwinian classics like “adapt or die.” But, still, the film never gives up on its cloying conceit that Beane is a put-upon Everyman, taking it to a ridiculous, almost parodic, extreme when we are introduced to his ex-wife’s new love Alán (Spike Jonze, in an uncredited role), a quintessentially West Coast patchouli-sniffer, raising Beane’s adorable daughter Casey (Kerris Dorsey) to, assumedly, appreciate vegan delicacies and the oeuvres of twee directors. For Beane, an Everyman’s Everyman fond of pensively driving his truck past Oakland’s industrial landscape, it is an intolerable situation.

Philip Seymour Hoffman as Oakland manager Art Howe

The film then builds toward a climactic showdown with the Eastern baseball establishment, Beane’s longtime antagonist. Though, now, instead of the Mets or the Yankees, it is the Red Sox flexing their financial muscles, looking to snatch him away from the Athletics after the team’s third consecutive division championship, in 2003, which was capped off by another heartbreaking playoff loss; in this instance, however, disappointment was far more cost-effective, making Beane as hot a commodity as off-field talent can become. With a patrician gleam in his eye, Red Sox owner John Henry (Arliss Howard) offers Beane a contract totaling $12.5 million—a record sum for a general manager at the time—setting up the movie’s moralizing ending, which hinges on whether or not Beane will again chase the money, selfishly abandoning home, team, and family for richer and more spotlighted pastures.

Sorry to spoil the movie’s sentimental postscript, but a couple of years after Beane’s putatively altruistic decision to turn down Henry’s cash, he signed a contract extension with the Oakland Athletics, one that gave him an ownership stake in the team, suggesting that, more than anyone around him, Beane did indeed know how to play the game.

Joseph Pisano grew up on the South Side of Chicago, rooting for the White Sox, 2005 World Series champions, and his criticism has also appeared in The Village Voice.

Copyright © 2011 by Cineaste Publishers, Inc.

Cineaste,Vol.XXXVII No.1 2011

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