Moneyball (2011)

Billy Beane was an old, beaten, washed-up, broke, and losing dog--the GM of the Oakland A's circa 2001. He was afflicted with the tightest budgetary constraints of any team in baseball, a measly $30 million. Compare that to the $120 million of the New York Yankees, and it's easy to see how bigger teams could steal star players like Jason Giambi from a team barely limping along. But this old dog hates losing--more than he hates winning, he says--and he certainly learned a few new tricks. Moneyball is based off of the book by Michael Lewis, and is a really remarkable true story of how this man revolutionized the game of baseball, throwing off a hundred years of reliant scout theory to reinvent his team.

Brad Pitt is stellar as Beanes. As a young man he was supposed to be the next big thing in baseball. He was supposed to be the next all-star. But whether by nerves or bad luck he faltered when he entered the major leagues and his name was sponged out. He left the field to become a scout and there he remained for years, helping a ragtag bunch who were last in the American League. His advisers hashed out the same arguments for picking new players and all the while the frustration mounted until Billy couldn't seem to cope with it anymore. He needed something new, and he found it in the face of Peter Brand.

Peter is played by equally (if surprisingly) good Jonah Hill. Brand is a Yale graduate with a degree in economics who fluked his way into baseball. After an embarrassing meeting with some team or another, Beane finds Brand, and taken up with his computer-age, scientific approach to viewing baseball Beane hires him for himself. The way Peter views baseball there is no person at the plate. There is simply a statistic. Old school thinkers would decide on drafting players coming down to things as trivial as the attractiveness of his girlfriend (an ugly girlfriend means he has no confidence). Peter has no interest in that, and soon neither does Billy.

What Billy cares about is getting on base and scoring runs, and it must be done on a budget. Peter uses statistical data to scout out all of the promising athletes, blind to stigmas like age, previous handicaps, whether or not other teams want them, to create a list of players who can get on base. It skirts past the issues of money and politics and hits right at the heart of the matter.

Of course, the experiment succeeded. It would have been a lousy book and a lousier movie had it not. The Oakland A's went from the absolute bottom of the pack to breaking into the history books as being the first team in all of baseball to win 20 consecutive games. Something amazing had to come from this story. I know so little about baseball, but I know about sports films, and this--especially a true story--was amazing. It is the mark of a exceptional film-maker to make a guy like me care about a baseball team, but care I did and very much.

I was nervous when starting this film because I was not sure if this was going to be a baseball movie or a movie about baseball. I am pleased to report it was squarely in the latter category. This is a film about a desperate man taking desperate measures to try and get the laughing stock of the league some respect. When that goal turns into changing the name of the game, well then things become a little more complicated. Director Bennett Miller (Capote) has done an exemplary job of making the inaccessible--sports jargon and statistical analysis--not only understandable, but exciting. I was so invested by the end in the characters and the team that I was literally out of my seat come those peak moments. This is a really entertaining film with great dialogue and great performances, especially by leads Pitt, Hill, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman who plays the Manager out to challenge Beane's new inspiration. This is one of the best films this year and one of the best sports movies that I have seen.

3.5/4