"Moneyball" is based on the true story of how Oakland Athletics (often called the "A's" for short) general manager Billy Beane created a baseball team with a minimal budget and a whole lot of statistics. While some liberties were taken with some of the events and conversations, I can tell you from both having read the book and from remembering the 2002 baseball season, that a lot of what happens in the movie is truly how it happened. I guess it would be prudent to give some background information on the book first, so humor me for a paragraph or two if you will.
Baseball, pretty much since its inception, had often relied on certain statistics to gauge players and their worth. What Beane came to realize from his own experiences and learnings is that this reliance on those certain statistics was severely flawed. Beane himself was a hot prospect coming out of high school, seemingly a future MLB superstar in the making. He had a full college scholarship to go to Stanford University at his disposal. However, professional scouts were knocking on his door as well, and ultimately the New York Mets talked him into changing plans and signing with them. Unfortunately, and for whatever reason, it never really panned out for Beane as a pro ballplayer. After languishing for a number of years amongst several teams, going back and forth from the majors to the minors, he quit as a player and became a scout. As Beane was growing up and going through his years of playing baseball, and later into management, he was a big fan of an annual publication called the Baseball Abstract, which was published in the 1970's through the 1980's by Bill James. In this publication were mind-numbing amounts of statistical data that seemingly told readers the kind of information that baseball scouts should seek. For one thing, it doesn't matter how hard a guy hits the baseball and how many home runs he hits. What should matter is how many times the guy just plain gets on base. You can't score runs if you can't get on base, and you can't win games if you can't score runs. Statistics such as OBP (on-base percentage) and OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage) and "runs created" (a furthering of the RBI, runs batted in) have come into the lexicon due to James's works and influence on modern scouting. As it turns out, many of the general managers in baseball today follow these very methods, known as sabermetrics (derived from the acronym for the Society for American Baseball Research, or SABR).
The movie is much less about the statistics and more of a flowing story, with Oakland GM Billy Beane (Brad Pitt, in what I feel is his best work to date) coming off his team's loss in the 2001 playoffs to the New York Yankees. The Yankees have a huge payroll, more than 4 times that of Oakland. Beane approaches the team owner, Steve Schott (Bobby Kotick, the President and CEO of Activision), asking for just a little more money to sign new players since they are about to lose their top three stars to other teams that can afford them. Schott tells Beane there's no more money to give and he'll just have to find new stars. Beane first tries to make a trade with the Cleveland Indians, but comes up empty when he visits the team GM. During that visit, he sees a young member of the management squad that seems to have a lot of influence on Cleveland's decisions, and Beane approaches him later to find out what he's all about. Beane is impressed with this young man and just days later hires him to be his assistant GM at Oakland. That young man is Peter Brand (Jonah Hill).
(Incidentally, Brand is based on Paul DePodesta, who had no problem collaborating on the film but just did not desire to have his real name used.)
Beane takes the knowledge of Brand and winds up drawing up a list of players that he wants to draft. The A's scouts think Beane has lost his marbles, as they continually push for players who have a great swing and hot girlfriends (because, you see, that means the player has confidence, according to the old-school scout wisdom). Beane drafts players such as Chad Bradford (Casey Bond) and Jeremy Giambi (Nick Porrazzo) and Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt) based on their ability to, more than anything else, get on base. Despite these draft picks, Beane finds himself in contention with the team manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), as when the season begins, Howe is putting in the players he wants versus those that Beane drafted and wants to see out on the field.
The team is faring poorly in the first month-plus of the season, and Beane is convinced that part of the reason is that Howe is still not putting Beane's desired players on the field. Hatteberg was signed to play first-base, but Carlos Pena (who is the one player on the team doing well) is out there instead. Bradford isn't coming out of the bullpen, Mike Magnante is. As the season wears on and the trade deadline approaches, Beane makes some roster moves that surprise the team, the manager and even Peter Brand. However, persistence and perseverance ultimately pay off as the team sees their record start to improve. The film rolls along and we find out just how successful the sabermetric method turns out to be for Oakland.
This film would be best enjoyed by baseball fans. However, you don't have to be a baseball fan to enjoy it. The film just tells a great story, mixing humor with sports and typical human situations one would expect to see in any walk of life. The film takes a break from baseball now and then to focus on Beane's personal life, as he is amicable with his ex-wife and frequently is visited by his young daughter. (In reality, Billy Beane at this point in time was remarried, and scenes were even shot with his second wife, but it was felt to slow down the story and add an unnecessary layer of plot elements, so the entire arc was dropped.) The performances given by Pitt and Hill and several of the actors portraying players are all perfectly understated and entirely believable. In fact, several of the actors do have major league experience, such as Stephen Bishop, who portrays David Justice. When Bishop was young and entering MLB, his nickname was "Young Justice" because of his facial resemblance to the actual David Justice.
You would be hard-pressed to find negative reviews for this film anywhere, and the movie wound up to be on many critics' Top 10 lists for 2011 movies. "Moneyball" has won several accolades for Pitt and for screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, and has been nominated for 6 Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor (Pitt), Best Supporting Actor (Hill, a surprise nominee but a pleasant surprise indeed), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing and Best Sound Mixing. Major League Baseball gave complete and total access to the filmmakers, with shooting taking place at a number of actual stadiums and plenty of actual MLB footage used throughout the film. This film is a thumbs-up all the way, just a great movie that delivers the goods. We'll see on Sunday if the film can get on base and win the last game of the season.
"Moneyball" is now available on DVD and Blu-Ray, or can be viewed via live stream from YouTube, Amazon and other outlets.
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