Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) is upset by his team's loss to the New York Yankees in the 2001 postseason. With the impending departure of star players Johnny Damon, Jason Giambi, and Jason Isringhausen to free agency, Beane attempts to devise a strategy for assembling a competitive team for 2002 but struggles to overcome Oakland's limited player payroll. During a visit to theCleveland Indians, Beane meets Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a young Yale economics graduate with radical ideas about how to assess players' value. Beane tests Brand's theory by asking whether he would have drafted him, Beane having been a Major League player before becoming general manager. Though scouts considered Beane a phenomenal player, his career in the Major Leagues was disappointing. After some prodding, Brand admits that he would not have drafted him until the ninth round and that Beane would probably have gone to college instead. Sensing opportunity, Beane hires Brand as the Athletics' assistant general manager.
The team's scouts are first dismissive of and then hostile towards Brand's non-traditional sabermetric approach to scouting players. Rather than relying on the scouts' experience and intuition, Brand selects players based almost exclusively on their on base percentage (OBP). By finding players with a high OBP but characteristics that lead scouts to dismiss them, Brand assembles a team of undervalued players with far more potential than the A's hamstrung finances would otherwise allow. Despite vehement objections from the scouts, Beane supports Brand's theory and hires the players he selected, such as unorthodox submarine pitcher Chad Bradford (Casey Bond). Following the free agent signings, Beane finds that he also faces opposition from Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the Athletics' manager. With tensions already high between them because of a contract dispute, Howe disregards Beane and Brand's strategy and plays the team in a traditional style despite their unsuitability. Beane is eventually forced to trade away the lone traditional star player (Carlos Peña) to force Howe to use the new recruits.
Early in the season, the Athletics fare poorly, leading critics within and outside the team to dismiss the new method as a dismal failure. Beane convinces the owner to stay the course, and eventually the team's record begins to improve. Ultimately, the Athletics win an unprecedented 20 consecutive games, setting the American League record. Their streak is capped with a victory over the Kansas City Royals. Like many baseball players, Beane is superstitious and avoids attending or sometimes even following games as they are in progress. His family convinces him to go to the A's game against the Royals, as Oakland is already leading 11–0 after the third inning and appears set to continue their winning streak. Beane arrives, only to watch the team go to pieces and allow the Royals to even the score. Finally, the A's do clinch the victory with a walk-off home run by one of Brand's picks, Scott Hatteberg. Despite all their success, the A's lose in the first round of the postseason, this time to the Minnesota Twins. Beane is disappointed, but satisfied at having demonstrated the value of his and Brand's methods.
In closing, the film notes that Beane passed up the opportunity to become the general manager of the Boston Red Sox, despite an offer of $12.5 million a year salary, which would have made him the highest paid GM in baseball history. Also noted is Boston's World Series victory soon after in 2004, based on the theories that Beane pioneered.
CAST
- Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics
- Jonah Hill as Peter Brand, Beane's assistant general manager
- Philip Seymour Hoffman as Art Howe, the manager of the Oakland Athletics
- Chris Pratt as Scott Hatteberg, A's first baseman
- Casey Bond as Chad Bradford, A's submarine relief pitcher
- Stephen Bishop as David Justice, A's outfielder
- Royce Clayton as Miguel Tejada, A's shortstop
- David Hutchison as John Mabry, A's utility player
- Kathryn Morris as Tara Beane
- Robin Wright as Sharon, Beane's ex-wife and mother of Casey
- Kerris Dorsey as Casey Beane
- Cast notes
- "Peter Brand" is a composite character partly based on Paul DePodesta, who did not want his name used in the film.
- Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, makes an uncredited cameo appearance as former A's owner Stephen Schott.
- Spike Jonze has a small uncredited role as Alán, Sharon's spouse. Jonze directed Being John Malkovich, in which Pitt makes a cameo appearance and produced Synecdoche, New York, starring Hoffman.
- Musician Joe Satriani appears as himself, performing the Star-Spangled Banner on electric guitar.
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COMMENT:
Moneyball is a sports-movie genre. In this movie, A's general manager Billy Beaneshakes up his ball clubs's scouting operation by bringing in a number-cruncher named Peter Brand has plan to mathematically analyze players in ways traditional scouts never had.
By all outward appearances, Academy Award-nominated director Bennett Miller’s adaptation of Michael Lewis’ bestselling book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, follows a pretty rote sports-film path, Rag-tag ballplayers form a powerhouse team that succeeds against all odds. It’s been done up and down, from The Bad News Bears to Major League to Angels in the Outfield.
What sets Moneyball apart is the statistical analysis that brought the players together for their banner season. The method, dubbed “sabermetrics” by baseball historian Bill James, comes to the Oakland front office after Beane snatches up a Yale-educated whiz kid from the Cleveland Indians and brings him West.
“I’m playing someone who is literally a masterful statistician and mathematician, so I had a statistics tutor,” Hill told Wired.com in a recent interview about the movie, which opens Friday. “That was probably the hardest job on Moneyball was trying to teach me statistics. But I really studied hard and I think when you watch the movie it sounds like I know what I’m talking about.”
Hill’s character is actually an amalgamation of people who worked for Beane during the A’s breakout season including the manager’s right-hand man, Paul DePodesta but the outcome is largely the same as the real story. Beane knows he can’t win with a payroll that’s a fraction of a marquee team’s budget, so Brand teaches him and his scouts how to use their money to buy hits and runs, as opposed to baseball stars. In the real world, Beane’s revolutionary move altered the way people thought about baseball.
In the film, as in real life, the math paid off, amazing baseball fans in the process. By focusing on players’ on-base percentages instead of home-run records, the A’s went on an unprecedented 20-game winning streak in 2002, topped off by a game-saving, bottom-of-the-9th homer by Scott Hatteberg.
It’s not until that moment, in the third act, that the thrill of watching a great sports film comes back into sharp focus. Until that point, the story has zeroed-in on the sabermetrics system and all the ways it could fail. We learn why Beane, a would-be baseball star who never made it, wanted to change scouting methods. A few humorous takes show Brand, more used to seeing players as numbers than people, trying to communicate with brusque jocks. But when Hatteberg hits his homer, it’s as good as any moment in Field of Dreams.
Moneyball is the most cerebral sports drama since Any Given Sunday.
That’s the magic of Moneyball, it’s a PG-13 sports movie for wonks who thought card-counting was the most interesting part of Rain Man. It’s also a math movie for sports fans who want to see a group of underdogs do well. Add in all the complex, front-office fuss, and Moneyball becomes the most cerebral sports drama since Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday. Thanks to smart performances by both Pitt and Hill, the film doesn’t boil down to a nerds-versus-jocks movie by the end, the two are on the same team.
The moral of the film is fairly simple: Everyone’s value is subjective. Players not highly regarded by one team could become incredible assets to another. Numbers geeks not appreciated by baseball in general could prove invaluable to managers looking to game the system. It’s not the kind of movie everyone will find priceless, but for moviegoers who like brains and balls, Moneyball knocks it out of the park.
