You're so money

It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball.” So says Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt), failed ball player and general manager for the bottom-dwelling Oakland Athletics in Moneyball.

Billy’s the kind of guy who won’t go near the stadium when his team is playing — he thinks it will jinx them. Instead, he suffers in private, listening to snippets of the game on radio, in the gym, or driving around town. When the A’s lose, he throws furniture, breaks windows, punches vending machines.

In short, he’s a doomed baseball romantic.

But his team never makes it to the pennant, partly because more well-endowed teams (meaning those with deeper pockets, like the New York Yankees) raid the A’s roster each year, purchasing the best players. The Yankees toss out $125 million a year on players, while Oakland has a measly budget of about $39 million. It’s a marked discrepancy that drove Michael Lewis’s 2003 nonfiction book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, and it makes for a fascinating back-office view of the game that will draw in even non-baseball fans.

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I can actually prove this. I sat in a room watching Moneyball with five women who knew little or nothing about baseball, and tried my best to field intermittent questions about the difference between balls, strikes and bunts, all the while trying to enjoy the movie. But after about 40 minutes, the movie took over for me: the smart, funny script by Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin made what could be a dry subject — the economics of winning baseball — into something almost magical.

It also didn’t hurt that they had Brad Pitt to look at, I suppose. Aging well, Pitt steps into the role of a guy who chose pro baseball over a Stanford scholarship long ago; even though pro ball didn’t work out, he develops an eye for talent and eventually becomes the general manager of the struggling Oakland Athletics.

But he’s tired of the bidding wars, and the prevailing belief that you can only win World Series pennants by outspending the other teams.

Enter Yale economics major Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), who has spreadsheets and formulas to prove that you don’t need hotshot egos to win ballgames, all you need is the math. He convinces Beane to buy up undervalued players who have respectable OBPs (on-base percentages); the logic is, the more players that get on base per season, the more chances of scoring runs and winning games.

At first, Beane and Brand’s strategy is blocked by crusty team manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who won’t implement any of their changes, such as putting in an unproven first baseman, and the Athletics continue to lose.

But, this being a sports movie, there has to be a point where the Bad News Bears start turning things around. There’s the obligatory “comeback” sequence, showing the A’s rising from the ashes of a disastrous early season to win an amazing 20 games in a row; they do get to the playoffs, but Beane, knowing the game as well as he does, solemnly remarks that “all people remember is the last game of the season.” His philosophical musings tend to make the Athletics management view him as a flake, but he’s really just like any true baseball fan: so caught up in the intricacies of what makes teams win or lose that it’s hard for him to actually relax and “enjoy the show.”

But who said baseball was ever really about eating hotdogs and popcorn in the stands? Ever since Babe Ruth was traded by the Red Sox to the New York Yankees in 1918, it seems what goes on behind the scenes is what really makes baseball tick. Moneyball exposes this in ways both funny and painful to watch. Players are traded like, well, baseball cards with little more than a day’s notice and a handshake. One of the most “exciting” scenes takes place in Beane’s office, where the GM — habitually eating between phone calls — sets up a string of trades and counter-trades via speakerphone. Hill meanwhile stands out as economics geek Brand, masking his inner job anxiety within layers of understatement; eventually, even he gets to pump a fist in the air when the A’s start winning. (Both actors were nominated for Oscars.)

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By the end, you might not be totally convinced that the machinations of Beane and Brand are what actually turned the team around; it could have been any combination of variables, such as player personalities, injuries, team nurturing, or even just luck. But Moneyball does point out that the same principles used by Beane — based on the “sabermetric” approach to picking winning teams developed by math whiz Bill James — were adopted by the Red Sox, the most doomed team in baseball. That is, they were until they won the World Series in 2004 (and again in 2007) based on the player selections of young Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein. I’ll admit, like a lot of Bostonians, I was plenty surprised when the Red Sox actually buried their egos and began playing like a real ball team in 2004 and started wining games. Before, all we ever heard about was Wade Boggs’ salary or Roger Clemens’ ego. It was all about the money, not the team. Then, as though struck by lightning, the Boston team went all the way to the World Championship for the first time in 86 years. A miracle, by any measure.

So maybe there is something to that sabermetric approach after all.