As the 2011 baseball season approaches its 162nd game, most eyes will be on the Boston Red Sox and the Tampa Bay Rays. The former has blown the nine game lead they held in the Wild Card race on September 9th when they were a half-game back of the New York Yankees and on pace to win 98 games in the stacked American League East. The latter took advantage of Boston’s precarious pitching and drew even on the second-to-last day of the season. If both teams win against their respective opponents, Baltimore and New York, a one-game playoff will decide who polishes their golf clubs tomorrow morning.
As a Mets fan, the only interest I hold in this circumstance is to watch a team suffer a more epic collapse than New York did in 2007 when they decided that a consecutive division title and a playoff berth just wasn’t their thing. At the same time, there’s something eerie about the surging Rays and the plummeting Sox coinciding with the release of Moneyball, a film based on Michael Lewis’ 2003 novel of the same name that examines the actions of Oakland A’s general manager, Billy Beane, just after he loses a heartbreaking five-game series to the New York Yankees and, subsequently, loses three marquee players: Jason Giambi (Yankees), Johnny Damon (Boston), and Jason Isringhausen (St. Louis).
As the general manager, Beane (Brad Pitt) handles a small-market club that lies behind the “rich teams,” “poor teams,” and beneath “fifty feet of crap.” Plus, it’s “gutted” and unable to hold onto its centerpieces once they are allowed to test the waters of free agency. Therefore, they become less a perennial contender and more a “farm system” for other teams like the Yankees, Red Sox, and Mets with deeper pockets. Acknowledging the need for the ball club to “adapt or die,” Beane teams up with Peter Brandt (Jonah Hill), a baseball analyst with an economics degree from Yale, to build a team that is not based on marquee names or “five tool players” who look “ready to play the part,” but is cultivated from statistical success, focusing primarily on “on-base-percentage.” Here, like in Lewis’ book, the theory is sound: the more people on base, the more possible runs. The more runs scored, the more wins. This theory ultimately benefits Beane and his ball club because on-base-percentage doesn’t demand as much money as homeruns, stolen bases, and other crowd-drawing spectacles.
In Moneyball, the theory is sound and proven – at least in 2002 – as the A’s won one more games than they did in 2001 when they had big names in their line up and on the mound. And in terms of nostalgia, it was fun to relive the A’s strive for twenty wins in a row as they nearly blew an eleven run lead over the lowly Kansas City Royals, however, the movie lacks something – and that something seems to be a “so what?”
Admittedly, it’s impressive to see what Beane did in 2002, and in a sense, he is credited with disproving the operational strategies of the biggest spenders in baseball. At the same time, the movie itself is rather misleading. Yes, Oakland began in the basement of the AL West. Yes, there was tension between Beane and manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Yes, there were questionable trades made around the forty-game mark in the season, and, yes, the A’s went on a huge winning streak and ended up finishing the season with 103 wins. However, there is very little credit given to their amazing pitching staff. Statistically, Oakland followed its game plan and scored runs via on-base-percentage rather than the long ball. But, in order to ensure this plan works, the pitching staff needs to keep the other team off the board – something that is facilitated by the presence of Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and former Cy Young Award winner Barry Zito.
In 2002, the triad won a combined 57 games of Oakland’s 103 wins. In 2003, they won 45 games of Oakland’s 96 wins; in 2004, they won 40 games out of 91 wins, and by 2005 – when only Zito was left because the other two were poached by bigger market clubs – the team had won 88 games and finished second in the West. While the film focuses a lot on the building of an offense through statistical calculations, it also elides the blatant connection between big name pitching and success.
What’s also a bit wonky – from a fan’s perspective – is the notion that baseball has been forever altered by Beane’s use of statistics to build a ball club. Oakland is a small-market team, but it has yet to win a World Series under Beane — and hasn’t been above the .500 mark for the past six seasons. At the same time, the movie dismisses the fact that the Arizona Diamondbacks won the World Series in 2001, the year in which the movie begins by documenting Oakland’s devastating loss to the New York Yankees. At that time, the Yankees were MLB’s top payroll at $110million while Arizona’s payroll was 8th at $81million. Admittedly, the A’s were paying a mere $38million, but that’s only slightly less than the Marlin’s $48.7million payroll (25th) when they won the Series (over the New York Yankees) in 2002 – the year that Moneyball documents. Likewise, with the exceptions of 2004 and 2007 when the Red Sox won the World Series, the other champs for the last ten years have been outside of the top ten in payroll.
In the end, Moneyball is a movie about a theory that portends to be successful but really isn’t. It also feels much like last year’s The Social Network – and even includes some of the same subdued score as Beane and Brandt tried to translate numbers into wins – but this is not necessarily a positive. Even though very little can be said in the negative about both films, I’m left to wonder “Who cares?” In one sense, the somber nature of Moneyball and its pitting of “haves” against “have nots” suggests a poignant allegory about capitalism and how the latter can “adapt”; however, regardless of the ideological “win” at the end, the most important “win” — in regards to the systems of baseball and a liberal-capitalist society — goes unattained. And, maybe this is much easier to swallow if you’re one of the highest paid general managers in baseball. To its credit, Moneyball is well-acted and well-written, but it stakes the claim that the little guy can win – when he doesn’t, despite the tongue-in-cheek metaphor at the end of the movie. More frustratingly, it imagines coincidence and a piece of success as the whole truth, which it’s not.
