It is impossible to distance myself from Moneyball. It’s like asking a dustbowl Okie to review Grapes of Wrath or a Holocaust survivor to analyze Schindler’s List. No, I never played on the A’s. Wasn’t for lack of desire. I have, however, worked for the A’s and attended over 1,000 Oakland Athletics baseball contests and my very favorite teams are the ones documented in Moneyball. In fact, the frustrating discrepancy between potential and payoff in the Art Howe A’s is probably the biggest factor as to why I no longer pay attention to the game. I spent the passion already. I’m done.
For the uninitiated, Moneyball – based on the Michael Lewis biography – tells the story of the 2002 Oakland Athletics, a team with a payroll roughly ⅓ of that of the New York 
Yankees and well below MLB norm. The A’s started the season by losing three exceptional talents because they hadn’t the money to pay them, or to put it another way, big payroll rivals offered more (even beyond market). Hey, what’s a movie without conflict anyway? Moneyball never flat-out says, “that’s unfair”, but the sentiment is behind every scene. The focus is not really the Oakland A’s on the field, but instead their General Manager, Billy Beane, who essentially had to reinvent the way talent is evaluated to make the A’s competitive. Baseball is replete with old school idiocy. It has been for decades. Sometimes old school wisdom isn’t wisdom at all, and it rarely accepts the new. Ask any unbiased economist what tax cuts to the rich actually do to an economy. You can see how difficult it can be to fight that elephant. Baseball is jam-packed with elephants.
Moneyball is like no sports film you’ve ever seen. It’s like a boxing film in that we study a man’s character (Billy Beane) inside and outside his venue. Unlike a boxing film, Beane never once enters the ring. He engineers the roster and then rolls the dice. That’s what GMs do. At its root, however, Moneyball is about simple economics – how do you beat the market? How do you tell traditionalists they’re full of crap? How do you create a winning baseball team out of three mitts, a fungo and a roll of duct tape? What if, just what if, you make sound moves and the team still doesn’t win?
Brad Pitt stands a chance here to repeat Sandra Bullock‘s 2009 feat of winning an Oscar (The Blind Side) and a Golden Raspberry (All About Steve). Pitt is Billy Beane the way Sean Penn was Harvey Milk or Phillip Seymour Hoffman was Truman Capote. He brings a strange energy to the role that makes you want to know what he’s thinking, especially when he’s making deals. It’s wonderful to watch even if you’re not an A’s fan. Now contrast that with Pitt’s work in Tree of Life in which his stilted and overly demanding father role made an unpleasant film all the more unwatchable. I don’t think he’ll be nominated for both awards, let alone win the big prizes, but I like the comparison with Bullock’s 2009.
I’ll actually find it a bit funny if there’s no backlash on Moneyball. In its way, it’s as subversive as any Michael Moore film. Americans pay a ton of lip service about cheering for the 
little guy, but in practice pay it no attention. Our “U.S.A. is #1” mantra has left only a modest tolerance for smaller notions and foreign ideas. We still shop at Wal-mart and eat at McDonald’s; we don’t say “boo” when big oil gets enormous tax breaks and we’re happy when the Yankees win. Telling Yankees fans they have an enormous and unfair advantage? Yeah, that will play well. It’s just a matter of time before the throng dissects the Moneyball argument and finds it wanting. When it does, however, the film will still rock. Let’s go A’s!
For what it’s worth, as an A’s fan I thought Moneyball was dead–on about Art Howe’s incompetence. I can’t believe it took the A’s as long as it did to part ways.
Rated PG-13, 133 Minutes
D: Bennett Miller
W: Steven Zaillian, Aaron Sorkin & Stan Chervin
Genre: Sports movie for people who don’t like sports
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: People who root for the little guy.
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Yankees fans.
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Jim,
Wow, I am really blown away with this website. This is really sophisticated and clearly a lot of effort. We enjoyed seeing you for a few minutes and are very happy about your good news.
I hope to be able to go see Moneyball maybe with Dan. I only go to one or two movies a year. I am planning on going to the library to request the social network.
Last week I borrowed Easy A from the library and the parents had some awesome lines – Stanley Tucci looked like he was having a good time.
I have bookmarked steelfrogblog.com.
John
Moneyball. At the outset I will disclose, as our host did about his allegiance to the A’s, that I grew 15 minutes from Yankee Stadium and have rooted for the boys in Pinstripes my whole life. There..I said it and can hear the collective boos in our shared digital space. That’s OK. I accept the flaws that come with supporting the Yanks.
Now to the movie…this is a very cool story and I love, love, love the idea of bringing statistics and modeling to the game of baseball when making choices. Having an Yankee family ownership who has traded so many prospects for “great” names like Ken Phelps, Steve Kemp, and Steve (please don’t hit it to) Sax. I wish the movie had more of the math behind it – actually take people through it in more depth. It reminded me of how much I enjoyed the scenes in Good Will Hunting where Damon is working out complex problems, or in A Beautiful Mind when hunky intellectual Russell Crowe’s brain goes into overload. We like to see smart people at work and applying those smarts to baseball could have been even greater displayed in the movie.
Despite both Pitt and Hill being nominated in recent award shows, I do not see completely why. Brad Pitt does not have a lot of hard work in this film. Look like Brad Pitt….talk fast with other GMs….throw a water cooler every now and then. My favorite scenes are him with his daughter and he does a great job in them. Jonah Hill plays a data geek and we really find out nothing else about him. No offense to Mr Hill, but looking the part was not a stretch given existing stereotypes of what the data guy should look like. I did like the dialogue and methods that were applied to, for example, exchanges with players when they were cut or traded. It does make you think about those discussions and what would you want it to be if it were you. I will admit that Brad Pitt’s explanation to Jonah on how to do it felt fairly similar to Clooney’s example of “fire me” to Anna Kendrick in “Up in the Air”.
Overall, a nice movie that actually does not make it the feel good hit of the summer as it does not intend to be. Refreshing.