Billy Beane's Winning Season

Moneyball on Third

Mar. 29, 2012

11:41 a.m.

Michael Lewis\' non-fiction account of Oakland A\'s general manager Billy Beane and his remarkable 2002 season, Moneyball, was not written with a movie in mind. It met many bumps on the way from green light to silver screen. Original director David Frankel left to pursue other projects and the studio rejected Steven Soderbergh\'s docu-drama screenplay. But Brad Pitt\'s determination to play Beane, a disappointing ballplayer-turned-middling manager-turned success story, carried the movie to a home run. Moneyball\'s ultimate director, Bennett Miller, tailored Lewis\' story of unconventional thinking in America\'s oldest professional game to the conventions of Hollywood entertainment. Anxious scenes at home plate and on the bench give way to heart-swelling moments of triumph. The grungy reality of locker rooms and offices in a second-tier ball club becomes the setting for sympathetically drawn characters struggling against intransigence Moneyball is also an underdog story every sports fan will understand—a heroic tale of the little guy slaying the giants. The drama is leavened with humor. Pitt\'s handsomely disheveled Beane faces a seemingly insurmountable problem as the film begins. The A\'s roster has just been cherry picked by richer teams, who can lavish sky-high contracts on free agents, while Oakland\'s owner can\'t afford to spend another penny. Beane fortuitously falls in with a nerdy economics wonk (played by chubby, sweaty-palmed Jonah Hill), who believes baseball\'s scouting system is plagued by irrational prejudice and all-around narrow thinking. If the A\'s can\'t afford a superstar, he asks, why not assemble a superstar team by recruiting undervalued but promising players identified through their statistics as analyzed through software? The reaction among the A\'s old guard runs from \"Huh?\"\"to \"Forget it, pal!\" The most memorable performances in Moneyball don\'t belong to Pitt but to the actor playing his adversary, the marvelous Philip Seymour Hoffman. Cast as manager Art Howe, Hoffman transforms grumpiness into high art and oozes smug disdain for Beane\'s untried theory. And for a while, Howe seemed to be correct. Running below the boys\' club banter and hits and misses on the field and even the problems of free agency and the class system of richer and poorer ball clubs is a philosophical argument. Can statistical analysis trump experience and intuition? Is baseball reducible to a science? Moneyball says both sides have a point. The pure use of computer-generated projections failed to assemble a winning team—until the human element of persuasion and deal making, coupled with a willingness to roll the dice, finally closed the deal. As Moneyball reminds us, one of baseball\'s unique joys is that a long losing streak is no sure indicator of the final outcome.