Moneyball
The Best Baseball Movie Ever (that Features Economics)
“Scott Hatteberg.”
“Who!?”
“Exactly. He sounds like an Oakland A already.”
We should probably clear the deck of a few facts before you read anything I have to say about this film.
I was raised in Oakland, and the A’s were my first favorite sports team. I love them.
My dad was an A’s season ticket-holder when I was growing up. I’ve been a season ticket-holder as an adult. I’ve probably seen at least 150 A’s games at the Coliseum.
I’ve read Michael Lewis’ Moneyball. It was the book that ended the longest book-reading dry-spell of my reading career. The years prior to its release in 2003 were also the first years of my teaching career, and those years extinguished my love for pleasure reading. This book re-ignited that love.
The 2002 Oakland A’s were and are my favorite non-Bash-Brothers version of the team. I went to at least sixteen games that season.
I was at game 18 of the streak, when Miguel Tejada won the game with a walk-off home run.
I was at Game 5 of the 2002 Division Series, that ended with Mark Ellis popping out to end the game and the season.
The real-life radio clips of Bill King, my favorite broadcaster ever, still get me. (May he rest in peace.)
As I write, I’m a despondent A’s fan who knows that the odds are very good that Oakland will lose the A’s very soon.
This is not the space for sports ranting. So I’ll keep my editorializing to this: I have a difficult time believing that current A’s owner John Fisher has ever been a fan who loved a sports team.
I mention those facts to establish a good-faith basis for the following caveat: maybe I should recuse myself from pitching this film. After all, my background might—might—lead me to an excessively charitable view of this film.
Having said all that, I do love Moneyball. To the extent we can draw a distinction between sports movies and sports films—and I think we can—this is one of my favorite sports films ever, even if it’s not a fun sports movie. I think it would be fun to create a unit on sports films and pair Moneyball with, say, The Bad News Bears. In a different universe, the book and movie versions of this story would work really well in a course that might—might—come to Gunn some day: Sports Lit.
“He has an ugly girlfriend.”
Aaron Sorkin is, famously, not immune to criticism about his dialogue. (By way of preview, we’ll discuss Sorkin’s dialogue in the Pitch for The Social Network next month.) Here, though, there’s a clear dialect divide between those who live the game, and those who don’t. So give Sorkin his credit—or maybe we should credit Steven Zaillian, Sorkin’s co-screenwriter. The lines from the scouts, in particular, ring very true; some of them are ripped directly from the book.
Without this dialect divide, the whole story would fall flat. The movie isn’t subtle, after all, about one of its core theses: “Baseball thinking is medieval.”
So we need to hear the voice of math be so distinct from the voice of sports. And because that’s true, it’s not unfair to say that Jonah Hill—who, to be sure, is imperfect—does an excellent job as Peter Brand. He is awkward and nerdy and yet quietly confident. His declaration to Billy that he would have drafted him in the ninth round, a declaration that gets him the job with the A’s, is inspired character screenwriting.
Peter doesn’t fit in the sports world, and because of that, he fits well in this movie. And there’s something very meta about that. In a lot of ways, this film is an anti-sports film. It rejects conventions of the genre just as Billy rejects conventions of the game.
“This had better work. . . . I’m just kiddin’ ya.”
Sure, we have some of the structural elements of a plucky-underdog-shocks-the-world arc. The Spring Training scenes are great. (I’ll pause here to give credit to the filmmakers for the fact that the baseball we see is about as realistic as I’ve seen in any film.) They are the Bad News Bears all grown up. It’s clear to everyone that this team is flawed and headed for disaster. Or, as the sports film convention goes, so we think!
And, for sure, Scott Hatteberg’s walk-off home run to win game 20 is as stirring as sports film moments get. (Again, perhaps I’m a bit biased. My one prized possession, the item I would try to save first in the event of a fire, is my Bill King bobblehead, who, every few times you push the button, will repeat that epic call.)
And yet, there’s not actually a ton of baseball in the movie. So much of the meat of the movie is math and logic and negotiations—all of which work well. Further, the filmmakers aren’t shy about the stark reality of the 2002 season: it ended not with a bang, but with a whimper. Indeed, the filmmakers choose to present the season-ending loss with as little fanfare as reasonably possible: poorly lit figures celebrate and dissolve away. So it’s not just that we don’t see the A’s win; we barely see them lose.
(Quick sidebar: one of my sneaky favorite parts is the supposedly anonymous analyst whose voiceover tells us as the Twins celebrate in Oakland that the A’s are “a fundamentally flawed team,” and that “[n]obody re-invents this game.” Again, I don’t want to rant too much, but any A’s fan (and most fans of baseball in the early 2000’s) can recognize that as the voice of Joe Morgan. And, to put it mildly, most A’s fans will tell you that they believe Joe Morgan harbored an anti-A’s bias.)
“It’s a metaphor.”
It’s against this backdrop that I can say with confidence that the ending does exactly what an excellent ending should.
Peter’s metaphor about Jeremy Brown’s home run is unsubtle, yes. But it’s apt. And it helps the audience that it echoes what we just heard from Red Sox owner John Henry: “The first guy through the wall always gets bloody. Always.” That idea forms the core of the film: trying something new and scary won’t always work out for you the way you want it to—but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try it.
And look, no one needs to remind me that Billy Beane’s approach has not led to any World Series titles for the A’s. But the film isn’t wrong when it points out that the 2004 Red Sox won the World Series in no small part because they adopted Beane’s approach. (Indeed, they did it in no small part because of the contributions of Kevin Youkilis, “The Greek God of Walks,” whom real-life and fictional Billy Beane coveted.)
And what this 2011 film couldn’t say is just how prescient, just how ahead of his time Beane was. Finding value in difficult-to-see statistics changed the game of baseball forever. The game today, with its methodical emphasis on analytics, would not be what it is—for better or for worse—without Billy Beane’s work. Seriously: in 2002, who had ever even heard of WHIP? WAR? OPS+? Today, these terms are common to the parlance of fans and fantasy owners.
It’s also important, though, that the Brown metaphor doesn’t actually end the film. It matters that we end on Billy driving, listening to the recording his daughter made for him.
Because Grady Fuson, the head Scout Billy fires, isn’t wrong. The whole “Moneyball” revolution is about Billy and his issues. One thing the film correctly hints at but does not go into depth about is that, by most accounts, Billy’s fierce competitive drive led him to flame out as a ballplayer. In the book, Michael Lewis recounts several anecdotes about how apoplectic Billy would get when he failed, and how hard it was for him to move on to the next play, and how much Billy just couldn’t get out of his own head.
The Billy we see is driven by two goals, both of which do spring from his failed career: he wants to show everyone in baseball the secret to sports success is not always visible to the naked eye; and he wants to stop letting everyone down—including his own daughter.
And so it’s a perfect, touching ending. His daughter clearly loves him, and has not only recorded herself for him, but has adorably changed a lyric to “You’re such a loser, dad.” So he ends the film not a total disappointment. But, importantly, the film ends with him driving, searching.
“What about the fans?
“Yeah, maybe I can teach one of them.”
“Good one.”
See you on October 11th, when we discuss The Lives of Others (2006).
Despite the fact that it (and, to be fair, the general narrative around Beane and the A’s, which always seems to ignore the fact that even after losing Damon, Isringhausen, and Giambi, that team was already really good!) ignores the reality of that 2002 team -- Mulder, Hudson, and Zito not getting a single mention is particularly egregious -- I do think Moneyball is the probably the best baseball movie ever made, not just the best baseball economics. Because it’s actually about the reality of baseball, not just using it as some vaguely-jingoistic background setting like most baseball movies are. Yes, it’s mostly math and logic and negotiation -- but then again, that’s what baseball often is. All numbers and logic puzzles and mind games punctuated by an occasional home run.
Plus, the use of This Will Destroy You’s “The Mighty Rio Grande” is one of the greatest needle drops in cinema history. I don’t think the movie gets nominated for Best Picture without that song, I really don’t.
Zaillian probably deserves most of the credit for the script. Sorkin was the name, but it really does not feel like a Sorkin script at all (and I’m pretty sure Zaillain wrote the drafts both preceding and succeeding Sorkin).
As a Yankee fan, I also thought Joe Morgan had an anti-Yankee bias. Maybe he just had a generalized anti-modern baseball bias. Or just an anti-good broadcasting bias. But hey, now John Smoltz has taken his mantle as the most annoying national color commentator.
And my condolences on the likely imminent loss of the A’s. It’s a real black mark on MLB. Maybe San Jose will get an expansion team.