Moneyball is the story of how one man took a failing baseball team, radically altered the way players were selected, rocked the foundation of Major League Baseball…and then continued to fail.
If you’re not baseball literate, the Moneyball philosophy claims to help poverty-stricken teams compete with their wealthy competitors. The essence is that instead of hiring big-time, expensive players you focus more on low-paid but productive players. Where a highly paid slugger can get you lots of home runs but strike out a lot, a team full of very productive players will be a very productive team.
So instead of bowing down to superstars, Moneyball teams kneel at the altar of statistics. Baseball has always employed the batting average and the Earned Run Average (ERA) to analyze players, but Moneyball teams staff their roster by relying on more obscure statistics like the On Base Percentage (OBP) and Walks plus Hits divided by Innings Pitched (WHIP). In Moneyball, a day at the ballpark becomes an occasion for laptops and spreadsheets instead of peanuts and Cracker Jack.
Oscar-nominated Brad Pitt does a wonderful job playing Billy Beane, the harried general manager of the desperate Oakland A’s. Faced with a formerly successful team that has been decimated, Beane embraces a new approach in the face of everything his mentors and the fans expect of him. He takes a ton of criticism, but- at least in that first season (2002)- he was able to reach the first round of the playoffs with a payroll that was millions of dollars less than that of the other competitive teams.
The film is good. It is full of witty dialogue, as one would expect from any project involving Aaron Sorkin. It does its best to make complicated baseball terminology accessible to the average viewer. Pitt immerses himself in the role of Billy Beane. Jonah Hill, nominated for Best Supporting Actor, is perfectly nerdy and just aggressively intellectual enough as Peter Brand, Beane’s statistical guru. The human story of Beane trying to maintain his career and family is nice. Instead of the overplayed workaholic-dad-trying-to-connect-with-his-estranged-child trope, Beane is genuinely affectionate with his daughter, who clearly loves him back. It’s a satisfying layer to a film that is basically about statistics.
Pagans, even those who have no interest in baseball, should be able to appreciate the radical thinking and action that Billy Beane took. He looked at a system that was getting him nowhere, sought a different solution, found one, and dedicated himself to the new path. Beane’s willingness to think differently strikes at the heart of what many of us are about: remove the old, tired ways of doing things and set out on your own, fresh, exciting path. Beane endured ridicule for his choices, but what he chose was the best path for himself and his team at the time. I think most of us can appreciate that.
That said, the Moneyball philosophy has never worked. Sure, the A’s got farther than they would have that first year, but the league wasn’t prepared for that kind of thinking yet. The A’s lost in the first round, and the World Series was won by my Anaheim Angels that year. The Angels also subscribed to a different philosophy, but they weren’t Moneyball. Our announcers called them “smallball.”
The end of the film suggests that the Boston Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 after “embracing” the Moneyball philosophy. That is not completely honest. The Red Sox had several big-name, big-check players that year along with some excellent fielders- all of that is against the Moneyball philosophy. One cannot employ expensive names like Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, base stealer and excellent outfielder Johnny Damon, and future Hall of Fame pitchers Pedro Martinez and Curt Schilling and call themselves Moneyball. Damon, in fact, is specifically mentioned in the film as a non-Moneyball player. Boston’s payroll is consistently one of the largest in the league. The Sox utilized the philosophy in part; they did rely heavily on statistical measures. But the movie’s suggestion that Boston was pure Moneyball is, in my opinion, false.
Moneyball is a baseball film. Really, it’s a baseball geek film. It’s not The Natural or A League of Their Own, stories that allow you to root for likable, if rough-edged heroes against the background of America’s pastime. You don’t really need much knowledge about the sport to enjoy most films about it. This one, though, will probably leave most audiences who don’t follow the sport cross-eyed.
It’s also a maverick story, and that’s probably the place where it can reach the heart of most Pagans. We tend to like people who buck the orthodoxy. I think there’s a little part of all of us that fells for the person who challenges the status quo. In that sense, maybe we Pagans are all a little Moneyball.
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