Moneyball

People are really loving this one but I’ll tell you right off the bat (get it?) that I didn’t think it was so great.  And the two major problems I had with it are the way it praises this new system of recruiting players while putting down scouts and also that it was too damn corny.

Just to be clear I haven’t read the book so I won’t be doing a comparison on the two nor did I follow the real life story at the time.  I’m mostly commenting on what I was shown in the movie.

Billy Beane (Brad Pitt (Cool World)) is the general manager of the Oakland Athletics and at the end of the 2001 season he loses his top three players.  But he still wants to win real bad despite not having the money he needs to get decent replacements.  Beane discovers Peter Brand (Jonah Hill (Knocked Up) who’s really stiff in this) when he tries to make some trades with the Cleveland Indians and realizes that this kid might know something about numbers and baseball and how to put the two together.  Brand convinces Beane that it’s all about a stat called on base percentage and if they just get players that have a high OBP then they should win a bunch of games.  And they do.

Ok, I’m gonna start with the corny part first.  To my surprise this movie focuses mostly on Billy Beane himself intertwining his sordid career as a player and his now pretty successful career as a GM (even though they want you to think that he’s down and out but I’m getting ahead of myself).  Brad Pitt was good in this role and seems to wear it naturally.  Beane can be colorful at times with his shoot from the hip kinda attitude and that was fun.  But there are way too many shots of Brad Pitt’s face almost entirely in shadows looking like he wants to hang himself.  It was annoying and kind of insulting after a while like the filmmakers thought we would constantly forget that Beane is haunted by his past and that he’s taking a gamble on something no one has done before.  They make it seem like Billy Beane just can’t win no matter how hard he tries.  But you know what?  In 2001 his team made it to the second round of the playoffs.  They came close to making it to the World Series and that’s pretty damn good if you ask me.  So Beane has some success under his belt.  It’s not like while he was GM they never had a winning season.  They had at least one.  So I think the filmmakers were trying to make Billy Beane seem pathetic but the guy isn’t a fuck up.  He’s the GM of a goddamn major league baseball team.  He’s not some weak figure that can’t get his life together.  Beane knows who he is and sort of knows what he wants (more on that later).  He went from crappy baseball player to general manager and I would think that would be quite an accomplishment.  The man never went to college or held any other job outside of baseball.  Good for him for achieving that.  I really didn’t like that the movie kept trying to convince us that he’s a fucking schmo.

The relationship Beane has with his ex-wife and daughter is typical Hollywood fare (and I mean that in a bad way).  They portray Beane’s ex-wife as kind of nice but also kind of dumb and cold.  There’s only one scene with her but it’s designed to make you like Beane more by showing that the ex-wife remarried someone who’s very un-macho, doesn’t know anything about baseball and got Beane’s 12 year old daughter a cell phone without discussing it with him.  They try and make Beane look cool and level headed by contrasting him with this other guy.  And again, part of the goal of this scene is to paint Beane as a guy that everyone throws off to the side as if to say, “even his wife didn’t want anything to do with him.  Why couldn’t she see the potential in Beane and believe in him?  Clearly he’s better than this other schmuck that she married.  Why don’t people give Billy Beane a chance?”     

The daughter is in this thing to make Beane look like a responsible father, a caring person and an all around good man.  It wasn’t totally necessary because I think all of that stuff comes through with his other relationships in the film, especially with Peter Brand who’s only 25.  But I guess it was to show that he’s not all business all the time.  And not that Beane’s daughter plays a big role in this or has a lot of screen time but having her play and sing “The Show” by Lenka (which is pretty much identical to “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz) not once but twice was two times too many (just as a side note, I can’t stand CGAF songs). 

Alright, now on to the baseball stuff and the problem is that there isn’t enough of it.  There are a lot of very short clips of games (pretty sure they’re the real games) but we don’t get to know the team and how they work.  I thought this movie was supposed to not only be about how this motley crew was put together but also how they worked together to win games.  There’s a bunch of the former but none of the latter.  As I said before this is a film really about Billy Beane and the players and their accomplishments take more of a backseat.  The only time the team gets some real attention is when the A’s go on an unparalleled winning streak and we see some of the final game that if won would break the record for most consecutive wins in history.  But even that’s handled clumsily as it’s shown in a montage of messy plays by the A’s and the scoreboard giving us the latest update.  I would’ve liked to have seen key plays in certain innings that made the difference.  And Beane has a weird response to the streak too by calling it meaningless.  He says that he wants what he’s doing to mean something.  But his A’s going for a record amount of wins is really impressive and does mean something.  I don’t understand what he’s looking for out of his rag tag team.  They’re doing incredibly well.  If this isn’t good enough then I guess he wants a championship but he doesn’t explicitly say that.

But the biggest problem I have with this picture is how it puts down all the people that don’t understand what Billy Beane is trying to do.  Beane has a whole panel of scouts that he meets with to help put his teams together.  After the 2001 season his three superstars left and of course he couldn’t afford to replace them with equals.  His scouts know this so they try to find the best players for the budget that they have.  After Beane hires Peter Brand and adopts the OBP approach his head scout comes up to him and tries to convince him not to go that way.  The scout gives a speech about how you can’t just ignore twenty plus years of experience, knowledge and intuition and that he’s getting players that look like shit.  He’s trying to say that a computer can’t look at a human and say if he’s going to be a good ball player or not, you need another human to help make that judgment.  Mainly to look for intangibles that can’t be tallied as a stat.  This speech is supposed to make the scout look like a bad guy and an idiot because he’s going against Beane and we, the audience, know better looking back but the thing is I pretty much agree with him.  This movie doesn’t say outright that other stats like batting average, home runs, RBIs, etc aren’t important but I think it is saying that you can reduce just about every player to OBP.  And if you want to win get the players with the highest OBP.  Apparently it doesn’t matter how you perform defensively either (I guess expect for pitching) just as long as you get on base.  I have a very very hard time believing that other stats, defense and just human emotion and makeup don’t really matter and not only won’t but shouldn’t be taken into consideration when putting a team together.  This movie makes what scouts have been doing ever since the game was invented look like the complete wrong thing and that they themselves have become somewhat irrelevant.  I don’t buy that man.

I don’t think the approach of just looking at OBP is wrong or anything.  I want to make that clear.  If teams with tiny budgets want to do that that’s perfectly fine.  In fact teams with small budgets probably should adopt that method because apparently it works.  What I don’t like is how the movie makes it out to be the be all and end all of baseball and makes scouts look like total buffoons that can’t find their ass with both hands.  They also make the manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman (Twister)), seem evil because he doesn’t understand what Beane’s doing either.  Just like the scouts he’s trying to put together the best team possible with the players that he has but the film makes him seem like a saboteur when he doesn’t play Beane’s crappy players.  The problem is Beane doesn’t communicate effectively to Howe what his grand plan is and he even admits that himself at one point.

At the end of the movie Beane is offered to be the GM of the Boston Red Sox for a record salary and is told by the Red Sox owner what Beane himself just accomplished like he forgot or wasn’t paying attention.  He goes on to say that anyone that doesn’t use the OBP approach is a “dinosaur”.  As if having a ton of money to buy high profile players suddenly became ineffective.  And this coming from the Red Sox is especially ridiculous because they had a budget of about $108 million in 2003.  That’s a far cry from the $40 million budget the A’s were dealing with in 2002.  Ok ok I get that Boston didn’t mean that they were going to stop buying expensive players, they just meant that they were also going to take other overlooked players that have a high OBP into consideration.

You know there are a ton of questions that could be asked about baseball that we could discuss here like is it unfair that teams with money will always be able to afford high profile players and teams without a lot of money will almost never be able to afford the same players?  Do ball players get paid too much in general?  Should there be a salary cap?  Etc.

If you want my two cents here it is.  Whether you have a $100 million team or a $40 million team it’s all kind of a crap shoot.  You never know how players will perform from year to year and even from month to month.  Baseball has a long ass season so anything could happen.  But, of course, you want the best odds so you game the system as best you can whether it’s buying up expensive players or finding guys with high OBP.  I don’t think you can put a good team together only going with your gut and I also don’t think you can put a good team together only crunching numbers.  This movie is saying that all you need are numbers.  I mean Beane was able to get his moneyball team to the playoffs but just the year before he managed to do the same thing with a slightly lower budget and without moneyball tactics.  So no system is perfect or totally predictable.  I think you need both numbers and gut.  I wouldn’t say the gut makes up the majority of your mind but it should play a small role.  For example if you have a player that has a high OBP but he just got a divorce then he might not play as well because he’s going through a tough time emotionally.  It’s gotta be hard to just shut that part of yourself off when you step on to the field but you make that call based on experiences that you’ve dealt with in the past and if you think the player can handle it.  And that’s why I found it so strange that the head scout and the manager are the bad guys in this picture.  Usually in movies we want to see both machines and humans go through a change and become more emotional and less removed like Pinocchio or some scumbag CEO in an action movie that’s willing to hurt people because it’ll save him/her money.  We want that puppet to be a real boy and we want that CEO to ignore the numbers because it’s not right to harm a bunch of people to make some extra bucks.  This film goes the other way and champions removing human involvement in recruiting players.

Overall I didn’t think this was the great The Social Network of this year type movie.  It really dragged at times, I didn’t understand what the goal of the whole thing was (have a winning season, win the world series?) as it gave me no frame of reference where I was in the course of the scheme and it was too much about Billy Beane.  The filmmakers thought that a movie only about baseball playing and baseball theory would be too technical and wouldn’t sell tickets so they compensated way too much and made it more of a biopic.  That was pretty disappointing to discover.  But I guess I’m all alone on this one because people are eating this picture up.  Maybe if this was made as a documentary it would’ve been more about the team?  I dunno.  I’m all moneyballed out.