Moneyball (6/10)

December 20th, 2011

Baseball and I were destined to be forever joined. I love the sport and I love statistics. There is no better combination of these two practices anywhere else in the world than on a diamond. Of course, being a 25-year Indians fan, the stat I tend to look at first is how far off the mighty Tribe are in the Games Behind column.

Moneyball is, I’d say, a viewer-friendly condensing of Billy Beane’s Oakland years into one, the 2002 season. Academy Award Winner Aaron Sorkin’s script is a typically well-crafted affair, but one that isn’t afraid to fudge a few facts here and there to keep the ball rolling, so to speak. Beane took over the reins as General Manager of the Oakland Athletics in late 1997 after Sandy Alderson’s departure. Alderson had already been told by team owner Steve Schott to cut costs and thus had investigated Bill James’ sabermetric statistics. Beane merely continued that which was already in place.

Here, however, Beane (Brad Pitt, whose characters always have one distinctive foible, in this case it’s good old tabacker-spittin’) has to bring in a bright young spark named Peter Brand, whose talent was being wasted in Cleveland. This, speaking as a Tribe fan, felt truer than anything else I watched, and even this was false. Brand (in real life Paul DePodesta, who refused to have his name attached) was an athletic type, and joined the Angels in 1999 and not 2002 as stated here. It was Brand who showed Beane the importance of looking beyond conventional wisdom when selecting players. Never mind your HRs, your RBIs and your SBs, look instead at OBP and runs created. That’s where you get your wins from; people on base just waiting for someone behind them to knock ‘em in. Beane, fed up from listening to his scouts trotting out the usual comments about prospective players, bought in to the principle, and the A’s proceeded to go on an American League record 20-game unbeaten run. You’ll note that I said American League. Moneyball strongly suggests that this was an MLB record, but it falls six games short of the 1916 New York Giants.

In this movie version, Beane has to replace the considerable talents of three stars who left as free agents. With the advice of Brand (Jonah Hill) he signed Scott Hatteberg, a catcher with a bad arm to play first base, high-living Jeremy Giambi (who, in reality, was signed two years previously) and DH/OF David Justice. The movie makes a big deal of these three, but the truth of the matter was that they didn’t really contribute massively to the team’s success that year. Barry Zito, Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder were a combined 57-21 with an ERA of 3.05, whereas Giambi got traded, Justice, considering his price tag, delivered little (and promptly retired), with only Hatteberg exceeding expectations – and even he is misrepresented here as a benchwarmer. The A’s success primarily came down to their starting rotation and MVP Miguel Tejada, none of whom feature in the movie at all. It’s pretty easy to be regarded as a superb GM when you’ve got those guys.

So with the history of the movie debunked, the decision as to whether Moneyball is any good or not comes down to whether or not you like the story. There are some remarkable feats in sport, but whether the little victories of a small-market MLB team counts as one of them I’m not so sure. With Pitt, Philip Seymour Hoffman (as a recalcitrant Art Howe) and Aaron Sorkin on board, you can be sure that this is a well put-together movie, for sure. If Sorkin can make the formation of Facebook into a thrilling adventure then he can sure do the same for America’s National Pastime. The fact, though, that he had to embellish the story to make it more appealing and cinematic suggests, though, that this is not a great movie.

Give me a good stat and I’m there. I’m all for sabermetrics, which do a great job in telling the game behind the game, but I believe that stats are only a percentage of what makes a team a success. They don’t factor in team camaraderie, locale (as Beane says when he looks around the clubhouse, ‘this place is a dump’) and any of the other variables that occur when a round-faced bat comes into contact with a round ball. ‘Statistics’, Professor Aaron Levenstein said, ‘are like girls in bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital’. Billy Beane continues to be the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics, and is still waiting for them to reach the World Series. As the movie tells us, the Boston Red Sox won the Series two years later using Beane’s ideas, to which I reply: what's that got to do with anything?