'Moneyball': why it just didn't work for me

Sportiness during a pandemic

The ongoing COVID-19 restrictions on sport of all types and levels means that sporty types are frantically modifying their exercise and training routines to be compliant with government guidelines on social behaviour while at the same time keeping active and ready for their next competitive event, whenever that might be. And as there’s only so many times you can click into the BBC Sport website to see if or when the Premier League might restart, sporty types are also listening to sports podcasts and watching old matches like never before (e.g. see the wonderful GAA development at https://www.gaa.ie/gaa-now/archive/).

‘Moneyball’

Then when things get really desperate, sporty types can resort to the lowest form of sports spectatorship: films about sport. So it was the COVID-19 restrictions that led me to sit down with the Blonde and finally watch the much lauded 2011 baseball film ‘Moneyball’, described by one reviewer as a melding of two other films, combining the romanticism of the baseball film ‘Field of Dreams’ with the zeitgeistiness (my word) of ‘The Social Network’ https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/nov/27/moneyball-review-brad-pitt-baseball

Along with COVID-19 desperation for sporting stimuli, I was also interested because I had heard about the portrayal in the film of John W. Henry, principal owner of both the Boston Redsox baseball team and my beloved Liverpool Football Club.

John W. Henry and wife Linda helping bring home the 2019 European Champions League trophy for Liverpool

'Moneyball' is based on the 2003 book ‘Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game’ by Michael Lewis and is centred around two real individuals. There’s Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt), a former professional baseball player who was the General Manager of the chronically underfunded baseball team the Oakland Athletics (‘The A’s’) from 1997 to 2015 and then there’s Peter Brand (possibly based on a character such as Paul DePodesta and played by actor Jonah Hill), the economics graduate from Yale who had never played baseball but who seems to have harnessed his nerdiness to develop special statistics based insights into the game.

Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) and 
Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill) in 'Moneyball'

The real Billy Beane, General Manager of Oakland Athletics from 1997-2015

Michael Lewis, author of 
'Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game'

The film opens with Oakland Athletics losing in the 2001 end of season match (American League Division Series) to the much wealthier New York Yankees, thus missing out on advancing to the World Series. To add insult to injury, bigger and wealthier clubs then swoop in on Oakland’s three best players and whip them away, leaving Billy Beane forlornly looking for extra money for the coming season so he can buy replacements. Told by the owner that ‘we’re a small market team and you’re a small market GM’, Beane realizes that his team, in having to sell their best players to wealthier teams, are merely ‘organ donors for the rich’ and 'the last dog at the bowl'. He goes on to define their place in the baseball pecking order: ‘There are rich teams, poor teams, fifty feet of crap and then there’s us’.

So Beane is left to scramble around for replacements and goes (baseball cap in hand) to other teams, most notably the Cleveland Indians. There, in what seems an unlikely scenario, he meets with half a dozen of their management (most of whom sit behind him for the meeting) and he gets nothing from them, but he does notice an overweight nerdy young man who whispers into the ears of key individuals as the meeting progresses. He approaches this individual (Peter Brand) afterwards, having noticed his quiet influence on proceedings earlier and hires him as an assistant at Oakland.

In a few brief scenes, Brand outlines his science and philosophy to Beane. Essentially, baseball teams pay huge amounts (e.g. 7 or 8 million dollars per year in salaries) for players who often look good and talk the talk but turn out to have limited talent and contributions to their teams. On the other hand, there are thousands of players who are frequently overlooked and grossly undervalued because of superficial characteristics such as their playing style or their appearance. Brand argues that ‘baseball thinking is mediaeval’. He does detailed statistical analysis on the performances of all of the 51 Oakland players, outlining to the intrigued Beane that ‘It’s about getting things down to one number’. He communicates his revolutionary ideas calmly and persuasively. He calculates that, to get to the World Series, the team will have to win a certain number of games and score a certain number of runs in the process.

Peter Brand outlines his methods to Billy Beane

Specifically regarding players, he argues that a player who produces a certain number of runs in a season can for example be replaced by three unknown, undervalued (and thus inexpensive) players who in combination can produce the same amount of runs. Brand’s approach is based on Sabermetrics, the statistical analysis of baseball, deriving its name from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Brand talks about an unclaimed and undervalued pool of players, ‘an island of misfit toys’, who if purchased shrewdly based on their performance indicators (e.g. number of runs and their ‘on-base percentage’) could be crafted together jigsaw-like to form a winning team. So far so good.

There are interesting scenes involving clashes between the older and ‘wiser’ Oakland scouts in contrast to Beane and Brand, where they question the new Brand-inspired Sabermetrics player purchasing strategy. These are set pieces designed to make the older and more conventional scouts look outdated in their approach and suspicious of the new approach. Beane throws questions at them to shake up their thinking, asking of one player being eyed up for purchase: ‘If he’s a good hitter, why doesn’t he hit good?’ There is resistance too from the team manager Art Howe (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) who is concerned about his tenuous one year contract and unhappy with the new purchasing strategy employed by Beane. 

The new season starts badly for Oakland, losing several games and finding themselves well down the league table. There is predictable questioning of the novel player purchasing methods, both from the older scouts and from Beane himself, but he persists with Brand’s methods, knowing that ‘these are hard moves to explain to people’. He occasionally checks with his nerdy sidekick: ‘Do you believe in this thing or not?’ and pushes on despite the poor performances. Along the journey there are a few tense scenes when Beane confronts the losing Oakland team and highlights his anger and disappointment with them, but he also gets closer to the running of the team as the season progresses.

And then things start to change for the better and Oakland start winning. They start on a string of victories that goes up and up from 12 to14 to 16 and then starts getting close to an all-time record of 20 straight wins, which they ultimately achieve. Beane has now fully bought in to Brand’s methods and is starting to see a bigger picture beyond his own team: ‘If we win on our budget we will have changed the game’.

Oakland Athletics after securing a record breaking 20th consecutive victory in 2002

The problem is, Oakland don’t win in the end. The 2002 season ends quite similarly to the 2001 season, with defeat in the final game and lack of progress to the World Series, again. The end of the film involves a meeting between Beane and the aforementioned John W. Henry of Boston Redsox/Liverpool FC fame, who tries to lure Beane to the east coast with a huge offer. Beane sticks with Oakland and (as far as I can see from reviewing the baseball results since 2002) does not progress to the World Series. In contrast, the Boston Redsox win the World Series in 2004, thus breaking ‘the curse of the Bambino’, alluded to in an earlier blog of mine https://sportyman2020.blogspot.com/2020/03/tipperary-and-kilkenny-curses-hurling.html. 

It is believed that the Redsox employed some of the Beane/Brand 'Moneyball' purchasing strategies in their success.

‘Moneyball’: some reflections

So what to make of it all? Ultimately, like many films about sport, the actual sport features very little in the film, and this was disappointing. You don’t need to know anything about baseball to watch this film, but likewise you will not learn much about baseball from watching it. And despite the setting up of Beane and Brand as co-revolutionaries, this is not a buddy movie, if you’re into that sort of thing, and their working relationship seems to come out of nowhere, based on that chance meeting when Beane visited the Cleveland Indians and subsequently changed his entire approach to player acquisition based on a few brief tutorials from Brand.

Likewise, although described a few times in nerdy excitement by Brand, the film does not really sell Sabermetrics as a method that can change baseball because, despite the reliance in Sabermetrics on the importance of numerically defined performance and results, the irony is that Oakland Athletics did not and have not won a World Series since 1989 (at a time when, incidentally, they actually had a very high payroll) and it is hard to prove if the more successful Boston Redsox won their four World Series titles since 2002 because of ‘Moneyball’ tactics or simply because of the considerable financial might of John W. Henry.   

So I remain unconvinced about Sabermetrics, because there is no clear evidence that it worked for Oakland and, more importantly, because it involves a ludicrously oversimplistic and frankly depressing approach to the complexities and frustrating beauty of team sports, relegating them to the level of ‘fantasy football’ and other ‘virtual’ versions of real games. To quote one of the older 'conventional' Oakland staff in 'Moneyball': 'You don't put a game together with a computer'.

No importance is given in this film to the possibility of players changing, developing and improving under the leadership of a talented coach; instead they are seen as immutable and unthinking pawns. No importance is given to the vital role of team dynamics and cooperation, or lack thereof. No importance is given to the influence of supporters, history, culture and tradition on team performance. No importance is given to the thousands of factors that influence individual and team performance for any particular game, from nutrition and injuries through to such intangibles as confidence, morale and luck. 

In short, the application of Sabermetrics or ‘Moneyball’ tactics to baseball or any other sport seems to me to be exactly the kind of hare-brained idea that would be thought up by an economics graduate with no experience of actually playing the sport.

Finally...

And now that I’ve started ranting, I will continue. Having done a little research on baseball before watching 'Moneyball', I remain convinced that it is spectacularly boring and hard to follow. The reason that there are so many films about baseball is, in my opinion, because it is regarded as the national game of a country that makes a lot of films. It’s also possibly because of the cinematic potential for those admittedly dramatic showdowns between pitcher and batter (‘strike three - you’re out!’, and all that) and those sentimental and schmaltzy life-affirming home-runs, set to orchestral accompaniment.

And another thing: it always both amuses and irritates me when Americans refer to their baseball ‘World Series’, involving as it does twenty nine teams from the United States and one from Canada. I suspect that I’m like many other Liverpool fans when I feel a bit shy about referring to my team as current World Champions, even though that title was achieved after winning a multi-nation European championship and then beating the best of the rest of the world in a seven nation tournament. Likewise, I wouldn’t dream of referring to my other team, the Tipperary hurlers, as current World Hurling Champions. But maybe I should, considering the international nature of the All-Ireland hurling championship, involving as it does teams from both parts of Ireland and the United Kingdom.  

Oakland Athletics: World Series Champions for 1989, after their defeat of the San Francisco Giants, a team from not only the same country but from 
the very same state 

Now here's an actual world championship winning team...

And while we're at it, let's finish with the 2019 World Hurling Champions: