On the surface,Moneyballseems like an incredibly odd movie. It’s a movie about sports where the heroes—Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and his assistant GM Peter Brand (Jonah Hill)—are playing statistician. The old ways of baseball are talked about in vague, intangible terms like “having a great swing” and “he looks like a star” and other things that the movie and time have proven don’t matter when it comes to getting wins. If you reduce baseball or any sport down to a science, haven’t you killed its art? If baseball is nothing more than finding the right numbers and then playing those numbers, haven’t you killed the game’s unpredictability?
The magic trick ofBennett Miller’s movie is showing not only how those statisticians upended baseball but were able to inject more romanticism into the game by leveling the playing field. The film consciously begins showing us numbers, but they’re not OBP or WHIP or any of the other acronyms that dominate the stat line. It’s the payroll for the New York Yankees vs. the payroll for the Oakland Athletics. Those were the numbers that were dominating the sport with rich teams and poor teams, and yet that’s supposed to be the world we romanticize? For all the talk of intangibles, those are very clear dollars and cents, and as Beane recognizes early on, if they play that game, they will lose and all the flowery language in the world doesn’t change a win-loss record.
Beane, with the help of Brand, decides to upend the game by investing in sabermetrics. “We are card counters at the blackjack table,” he tells his team of skeptical scouts, but the larger problem he’s trying to solve is his own love of the game. That love of the game in the face of logic and good reason is the core ofMoneyballand why it endures as a sports classic. Every single person who is a fan of a sport knows that feeling. We know that the game is completely out of our control once the players take the field, and yet we’re compelled to watch these feats of athleticism in service of obtaining victory. Sports make no sense, and if we drained them of their romanticism and forced them to make sense, then they couldn’t hurt us. They also couldn’t provide the dizzying power of celebrating a win, but as Beane points out, he hates losing more than he likes winning.
And yet Beane cannot escape his attachment to the game that burned him personally as a young player. Beyond the flashbacks to Beane’s struggles as a major league player, Miller frequently shows that Beane is like an addict who cannot divorce himself from the highs and lows of the game. He wants to treat baseball like a business, and it is a business, but he’s the guy clicking the radio off and on. He’s the guy smashing things when the A’s lose. A person who isn’t romantic about baseball doesn’t care. They’re indifferent. Winning or losing makes no difference, and Beane struggles throughout the film to try and put baseball in that box where if he can crack the code, he can win without risking anything beyond his job and reputation. That’s not the win/loss he’s interested in; he’s only interested in the win/loss of the game and changing it so that it no longer rests on these horrible intangibles that drive him nuts.
The cleverness of the film is in showing how Beane wins while losing, and that through his journey the two are intertwined. While the movie is based on real events (andMichael Lewis’ book of the same name), if the story had played out where the A’s win it all, that would have been oddly anticlimactic, or at least a climax in such a safe way as to drain the film of its more daring themes. To put it another way, Beane would be a guy who chose to count cards and won a bunch of hands of blackjack. That’s nice, but it’s not particularly inspiring, nor does it say anything other than counting cards is good. Instead, the film (and reality) provided a mix of exaltation and demoralization. The A’s performed even better under Beane and Brand’s new system than they did in the previous season, and yet they still lost in the American League Division Series. They lost the battle, but as the film argues, they won the war. Sabermetrics couldn’t be completely dismissed out of hand, and those who chose to do so did it at their own peril.
And baseball remains exciting! Far from killing the game with numbers,Moneyballshows how it becomes revitalized, and how we become drawn into the saga like a winning streak or a player like Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt) thinking he was washed up only to find new life under Beane’s system. The drama hasn’t gone anywhere. The artistry hasn’t gone anywhere. The athleticism hasn’t gone anywhere. Beane simply forces it to evolve and the film assures us that every loss will sting like hell and every victory will feel amazing. We don’t need intangibles to gussy up the game. As the closing lines ofMoneyballtell us, “just enjoy the show.”
