I still don't understand how they made a semi-hit movie about baseball statistics. With actual charts from old Baseball Abstracts. Really. (Two words, I guess: Brad Pitt.) Despite (or maybe because of) having spent my adolescence in nerdly thrall to the agate type of box scores and the Baseball Encyclopedia (my elves and orcs were Gabby Harnett, Lonnie Smith, etc.), only now, when it's hitting the second-run theaters, did I finally make it to Moneyball, which was the anticlimax I expected. Its big-picture lessons are ones I absorbed a quarter century ago, so naturally I was impatient with the way its tidy arc smooths out and sometimes just plain distorts the truth of what happened in Oakland in the early aughts.
After watching it I immediately caught up with the flurry of similar online criticisms, for example here and especially here. It's no wonder Art Howe despairingly objects to his villainization in the picture even more than the (very different) condescension he received in Michael Lewis's original book, and not only because, lean and almost laughably erect in life and more suitably embodied by John Malkovich or former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, he was played by dumpy Philip Seymour Hoffman. (Yogi Berra agrees.) And fans who remember the 2002 A's might be forgiven for hardly recognizing the team on the field: while the movie focuses on cheap, marginal players like Scott Hatteberg and Chad Bradford, you hardly hear a mention of the stars who actually helped them win the most, the once-in-a-generation young pitching trio, Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, and Mark Mulder, and the free-swinging (i.e. anti-Moneyball) shortstop Miguel Tejada.
I could list and add to the quibbles at length, but there's just one I want to note for myself: in going back to the book I was reminded that Hatteberg, the walk-happy, damaged-goods catcher that Billy Beane resurrects as a bad-field, good-hit firstbaseman, is not the clueless goofus of the movie, but a brainy player as analytical as Beane who made himself into an on-base machine against all the objections of the old, idiotic Red Sox coaching system. (How could I have forgotten, when my old hero, and short-lived Sox hitting coach, Jim Rice is held out as the most idiotic of all?) Wouldn't it have made a better story to have Hatteberg be as smart as Beane and his bean-counters and to be thrilled to have finally found a team that understood him?
On the positive side, I can say that Parks & Rec's Chris Pratt, who plays Hatteberg, is pretty close to a dead ringer for the ballplayer (see above).
But what I really want to say about Moneyball (both the book and the movie) is that the other aspect of my impatience with the story is not with the falseness of its arc but the datedness of it. As every baseball fan knows, the story has moved on and even been altered in retrospect (since the Moneyball theories are theories about the future, what has happened since affects how we view what happened then). Beane is still in Oakland, but the A's haven't been over .500, or in the playoffs, in the last five years, while the Red Sox, the formerly idiotic team that almost made him their GM, won two World Series after he decided not to join them. And plenty of Beane's personnel decisions in the book don't look so laughably clear-cut in hindsight: Carlos Pena, the young firstbaseman cast aside for Hatteberg, went on to lead the league in home runs, as did Prince Fielder, the draft pick Lewis describes as too fat even for the A's, while the diamonds in the rough ID'd by Beane's analysts in that same draft have, with few exceptions, not panned out. And Jeremy Bonderman, the high school pitcher whose selection in 2001 by A's scout Grady Fuson (the other villain in the movie) caused Beane to throw a chair through a wall in fury, made the majors at age 20 after being traded to the Tigers and helped them do something Beane's A's still haven't done: play in a World Series.
Lewis has mentioned on a number of occasions that he has thought about writing a followup to Moneyball, to track the players Beane's team picked out--I'd love to read it. My Moneyball 2 would be a more ambiguous tale than the first, of course. On one hand, it would be a story again of money, and of the speedy diffusion of innovation. As long as Beane and his theories were weird outliers, there were plenty of bargains to be found. But when rich teams like the Yankees and Red Sox caught on to them, as they had already started to by 2002, Beane's advantages dried up. (Like any good franchise opener, Moneyball actually sets this sequel up with one of its best scenes, when new Sox owner John Henry, trying to convince Beane to come to Boston, gives a lengthy monologue that's more or less a summary of Lewis's book.) Beane's lessons, aided both by his success and, no doubt, by the bestselling book, spread beyond the rich teams too, to the point that Beane himself, in search not of eternal sabermetric verities but rather any undervalued advantage he can find, has turned in recent years to qualities he once disdained, and thereby made unpopular and cheap, like defense and high-school players.
The other side to my Moneyball 2 is a subtle and human one, and it's best expressed in the story told by Keith Law, one of the models for the Ivy League laptop jockey played in the movie by Jonah Hill. Law was an opinionated analyst for the post-Jamesians at the Baseball Prospectus (which also spawned political stat superstar Nate Silver) who got the chance to try out his theories when he was hired by Beane pal J.P. Ricciardi to help run the Toronto Blue Jays. He arrived cocky and dismissive of traditional scouts (and was interviewed to that effect by Lewis) but came over time to value their more traditional expertise, especially as the popularity of the Moneyball method made it much harder to find bargains:
While I was there I worked with many scouts ..., many of whom tried to open my mind in 2002, 2003, when I was not open-minded, when I was 28, 29, and walked in the door and was told, "You're here, you're gonna replace ten scouts with the work you do." And I believed it, which was a terrible mistake on my part.
Why, that's a human story of comeuppance, redemption, and growth so moving that Hollywood might find a way to profitably sentimentalize it after all. How about Moneyball 2: Money Never Sleeps, with Law played by Shia LaBeouf? Oh wait, that movie tanked. Never mind.
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