Thoughts on Moneyball

I'm a huge baseball fan and always have been. A lot of people find baseball boring, and it definitely can be. Baseball doesn't have guys running up and down the court and dunking all over the place like basketball does or gigantic freaks of nature crashing into each other at impossible speeds like football does. Baseball takes its time. There's no clock in baseball, so the games just go on until one team wins.

I was reading this blog post by Joe Posnanski (by far my favorite baseball writer) the other day, and he pretty much summed up my feelings about baseball in a way that I am just not eloquent enough to express:

"Baseball, like life, revolves around anticlimax. That's what you get most of the time. You stand in driver's license lines, and watch Alfredo Aceves shake off signals, and sit through your children's swim meets, and see bases loaded rallies die, and fill up your car's tires with air and endure an inning with three pitching changes, a sacrifice bunt and an intentional walk.

But then, every now and again, something happens. Something memorable. Something magnificent. Something staggering. Your child wins the race. Your team wins in the ninth. You get pulled over for speeding. And in that moment -- awesome or lousy -- you are living something you will never forget, something that jumps out of the toneless roar of day-to-day life."

Suffering through guys stepping out of the batter's box to adjust their batting gloves after every pitch, endless conferences between pitcher and catcher on the pitcher's mound, and/or multiple pitching changes in an inning is all worth it when someone ends up hitting an impossible home run or making an incredible play in the field or a pitcher throws a beautiful curve ball that catches the hitter looking at strike three in a big spot. The mundane and routine occurrences during a baseball game make the special moments that much more memorable.

I was mostly a casual baseball fan up until my mid 20s, when I discovered Fire Joe Morgan (RIP). I started reading FJM because the guys who ran it were hilarious and would just tear pompous sportswriters new assholes. (In fact, the main voice of FJM was Michael Schur, who is the showrunner of one of my favorite TV shows, Parks and Recreation and who goes by quite possibly the greatest nom de plume in history: Ken Tremendous.) They made me realize that all the old hoary clichés about baseball players having "heart" and "grit" and "intangibles" was pretty much bullshit. Clubhouse chemistry means nothing if the guys in your clubhouse can't play baseball. They also introduced me to new statistics and challenged the way I thought about the game. Pretty soon, I was regularly checking out Baseball Prospectus and Baseball-Reference.com and was curious to figure out where these new stats came from. I had seen the FJM guys reference Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis in several of their posts, so I decided to check it out.

In 2001, the Oakland A's won 102 games and lost to the New York Yankees in the Divisional Series in five games. Oakland was set to lose three key players to free agency: Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon and Jason Isringhausen. Oakland's payroll in 2001 was just over $33 million (for comparison's sake, the Yankees' payroll was just over $112 million) and not likely to increase enough for the team to retain any of the three players, and indeed, all three signed huge contracts with other teams: Giambi signed with the Yankees for 7 years, $120 million, Damon with the Boston Red Sox for 4 years, $31 million and Isringhausen with the St. Louis Cardinals for 4 years, $27 million.

Moneyball follows the Oakland A's and their General Manager, Billy Beane during the 2002 season in the wake of the departures of Giambi, Damon and Isringhausen. Despite losing three of his best players, Beane is charged with keeping the A's competitive with a payroll that is a fraction of what most teams are able to spend. Beane's methods for staying competitive involve ignoring conventional wisdom and embracing a new way of thinking about baseball. Beane and his staff, most notable among them his right hand man, Paul DePodesta, all but ignore the advice of his scouts, many of whom judge players based on the "intangibles" I mentioned above. His girlfriend isn't good looking, so he must not have much confidence. He's slow and unathletic, therefore he can't play. He strikes out too much. He can't bunt. The problem is, none of the things I just mentioned have much to do with how well a guy, you know, plays baseball.

Beane and his staff dive deep into statistics to figure out which stats correlate with winning baseball games. I mentioned above that baseball has no clock. That is technically true, but there is one indicator that the game is over: all of the outs have been used up. As long as your team doesn't make three outs during its turn at bat, players can keep stepping to the plate and, more importantly, crossing the plate. Beane and his staff soon realize that getting on base is an extremely important skill and, more importantly for their purposes, an extremely undervalued skill. Talent evaluators in baseball were often beholden to one number: batting average. If a guy was hitting .300, he was doing his job. Batting average, however, does not tell the entire story of how well a player is hitting, it only tells you that he got a hit. It does not tell you what type of hit it was and it also does not tell you if he drew a walk or was hit by a pitch or reached base in any way other than a hit. Again, the key to winning baseball games is to not make an out. Whether you do that by getting a hit or drawing a walk doesn't matter. Before a guy can score a run, he needs to get on base. Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it? Beane and his staff are able to exploit this inefficiency in the marketplace and sign guys to below-market deals who may not have shiny batting averages above .300, but they get on base.

Moneyball completely changed the way I look at baseball. I grew up with batting average and RBIs and pitcher wins and pretty much took them as gospel. The fact that something as simple as "don't make an out" was revolutionary to me is completely baffling. How could I not have seen it before?

That Lewis turned a story about a small market team and their focus on statistics into a compelling book is a testament to his abilities as a storyteller. He also got extremely lucky to have Beane as his protagonist. Beane is charming, quirky and fierce. It's no wonder they cast Brad Pitt as Beane in the new Moneyball movie.

When I heard they were making a movie out of Moneyball, I had no idea how that was going to work. The book weaves the story of the 2002 A's in with Beane's early life as a hot prospect in the New York Mets farm system and the history of the sabermetric movement spearheaded by a new wave of baseball thinkers led by Bill James. Like I said, the book is extremely compelling and well written but, well, would you want to watch a movie about a small market baseball team that doesn't win the World Series, a failed prospect and baseball statistics? Yeah, me neither.

Still, when I heard that Steven Soderbergh was going to direct Moneyball, I was intrigued. Soderbergh's one of my favorite directors and his approach to adapting the book was an interesting one. He was going to turn the book into a quasi-documentary, mixing archive footage from the 2002 season along with re-created footage staged with actors. Needless to say, this version of Moneyball wasn't what the studio had in mind, so they replaced Soderbergh with Bennett Miller and had Aaron Sorkin punch up the script to resemble something a little more mainstream. The resulting movie is a bit of a mess.

Pitt is actually quite good as Beane (although it seemed to me like he was channeling his Aldo Raine character from Inglourious Basterds for some reason) and Jonah Hill is surprisingly good as Peter Brand, essentially a fictionalized version of DePodesta since DePodesta didn't want his name associated with the movie. Unfortunately, Moneyball the movie reduces Moneyball the book to Beane and Brand vs. the World. Watch Beane get frustrated with his head scout and fire him! Watch Beane argue with his manager over and over again! Watch Beane throw chairs and smash things with a baseball bat!

Moneyball the book had Lewis to be its narrator. Lewis carefully explained why the A's needed to use such radical methods to stay competitive with such a low payroll and also explained why the new stats the A's were looking at were better and more helpful than the stats so-called "baseball insiders" had been looking at throughout the game's long history. Since there is nobody to narrate Moneyball the movie, it's up to the characters to deliver the exposition to the viewer so we don't feel lost. Or, as Vince Mancini at FilmDrunk put it:

"Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane isn’t a character so much as a collection of quirks. He’s always chewing and spitting and pursing his lips, and sometimes he gets mad and throws stuff. He’s stressed, get it? Mainly, he’s a handsome delivery vehicle for expository ideas from the book who never actually connects with any of the other characters (not that I blame Pitt, I normally love him). That’s the problem with Moneyball, the only compelling parts are direct exposition of the moneyball concept from the book, and everything else is cutesy Hollywood bullshit."

I get that Columbia didn't want to put up a bunch of money for a Brad Pitt movie and have it flop at the box office. I get that this movie wasn't made for die hard baseball fans. Most of the other people in the theatre with me seemed to enjoy themselves. They laughed at all of Pitt's one-liners and chair throwing tantrums. A couple of them cheered when Scott Hatteberg hit his dramatic walk-off home run that gave the A's their record 20th win in a row. I just couldn't help but walk away from Moneyball unsatisfied. The storytelling lacked focus, the stakes weren't all that high and no character outside of Beane was fleshed out very well. Don't even get me started on Beane's adorable moppet of a daughter.