Moneyball – A smart way of looking at baseball

Brad Pitt stars in Moneyball, a baseball movie about a real baseball team that has hardly any baseball in it. It’s a tricky proposition that ends up working for baseball and non-baseball fans alike.

“It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball.” That’s an oft-repeated line in Moneyball, and somewhat ironic given the fact that the film, on the surface, is about as unromantic as possible.

This is not a movie about, say, a legendary duel between a pitcher and a slugger or the hire-wire intensity of a bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, full count pitch to win or lose the World Series.

No, Moneyball is about management. That’s right, management. And I don’t mean the team’s on-the-field managers, but front office type general managers, the guys who hire and fire players, the guys who argue contracts, who wheel and deal players like chattel.

Even less promising is that the particular GM Moneyball focuses on, Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics, is enamored with statistics and mathematical analyses of the game.

But what makes it romantic is that his approach is revolutionary and revolutions are invariably dramatic. They may start out as laughing stocks. As one admiring owner of another team says of Beane, the first man through the door always gets bloodied.

As GM of the Oakland A’s, every year Billy Beane sees his team knocked out by teams like the NY Yankees who have payrolls three times his A’s payroll. To make matters worse, his best players are then picked off each season by teams like the Yankees and the Red Sox who sign them to huge contracts. It’s a battle between the haves and the have-nots.

In a move of desperation, Beane hires a young Yale economics statistician who uses a new analysis called sabermetrics to look at baseball in an entirely new way. What this Yalie hypothesizes is that an obscure statistic called “on base percentage” is as important as any other stat in baseball and yet it’s completely ignored by the powers that be.

Armed with this inside information, Beane assembles a team that looks crazy to the conventional way of thinking.

Moneyball is about the amazing up and down adventure of a baseball team that started out the laughingstock of the sport and ended up fundamentally changing the way we think about baseball.

Moneyball changed me in to an Oakland A’s fan.