I’m looking forward to seeing the movie Moneyball, which gets it big premiere tonight at TIFF with Brad Pitt in the starring role. I’ve always liked the book, but more to the point, I’ve always loved the story behind the book, the story that makes up the cultural phenomenon that’s come to be known as Moneyball. It’s something that can be categorized as a sports revolution. It’s intelligence let loose on the subject matter of baseball. So, in keeping with the spirit of information mania suitable to an Aaron Sorkin screenplay, here are a few quick notes to get you ready to watch Moneyball, the major motion picture.
The Education of Moneyball
Around the year 2002, the Oakland Athletics asked a very interesting question about baseball. How do you compete against payrolls over $120 million deep, equipped with only a $40 million payroll of your own?
More interesting are the questions that unfolded from that one, questions which were being asked mainly by a man named Billy Beane. For instance, why were so many aspects of building a good baseball team being left to chance? Why was so much superstition still at play in a sport that was supposedly dominated by statistics and numbers?
Before it was a major motion picture, before it was first published as a book by Michael Lewis, Moneyball was a kind of revolutionary moment within the world of Major League Baseball. This was around 10 years ago, a general manager named Billy Beane was at the helm of the Oakland Athletics. Armed with much, much less money than say, the New York Yankees, Beane was determined not to be disadvantaged. In fact, because the market for talent in Major League Baseball had become so dramatically skewed toward overspending on players with the mere potential of stardom, it actually opened up other possibilities. Just as decisively as the market overvalued certain players, it was going to undervalue players as well. All Beane had to do, to build a great team for the fanbase of the Athletics, was find those undervalued players. (Also, of course, they were the only players he could even afford to sign to his team.)
So with a ‘baptism by fire’ kind of moment at the 2002 amateur draft, Beane recreated his team in the image of, well, something other than a Major League Baseball team. (The A’s had lost various high-profile players that off-season due to not being able to match what other teams were willing to offer their players, but as compensation received many extra first round draft picks from the teams who wound up signing former members of the A’s.) Billy Beane launched the Oakland A’s into the strata of Moneyball when he spent the bulk of his seven first round picks in 2002 on players that other teams didn’t even wantt o touch.
The Bildungsroman
Who is Billy Beane?
Well, he’s not actually the protagonist of the story of Moneyball, so much as he’s the subject matter itself. He’s the raw material of Moneyball, largely because he was at one point thought of as the raw material of baseball.
Billy Beane began his baseball career as a player. He started out as a major talent, scouted by the pros as a high school player. He was drafted by the New York Mets in 1980, despite the fact that he had been telling scouts he might just a well want to go to Stanford instead. The offer to play in the major leagues proved too tempting, and Beane signed with the team. In the end, however, he didn’t end up spending much of any time playing in the majors.
He was supposed to be perfectly suited for the highest level of baseball. In high school he was already athletic beyond the requirements of game. He fared very well on all psychological testing. There is even a thing that baseball scouts called ‘The Good Face‘. And he had it. Plain and simple, everything about him looked good in the uniform. He was baseball’s Brad Pitt. But that was high school. It just didn’t pan out. Billy Beane provided corroborating evidence that a great-looking prospect can’t ever be a sure thing, no matter how (or maybe especially because of how) early the old baseball scouts tabbed him for greatness.
Furthermore, having maybe never been fully committed to playing baseball as a career anyway, Beane realized that the fight to carve out a bit of time for himself in the majors wasn’t the fight he was interested in. His fight was going to be to change the flaws in the strategy of the game that was forcing teams into some superstitious faith in unproven potential. So he quit as a player and asked for a job in the front office of the team he would eventually be the manager of, the Oakland A’s. With this, as Michael Lewis puts it, “he concluded the fruitless argument with his talent”. But then, of course, to new arts his cunning art was applied (I think that’s a bad translation from Ovid).
So as a general manager Billy Beane sought to make good in the opposite way that he failed as a player. At last we see the human interest in our story.
The true eventual story of Bill James
A great part of what underpins the story of Moneyball is the statistical analysis of the game of baseball as practiced by a man named Bill James. James did thorough work re-imagining and redefining what the meaningful numbers and statistics in baseball really are. His statistical analysis became a key component to Beane’s new criteria for drafting, acquiring and evaluating baseball players. All the while ignoring those great high school athletes who have The Good Face.
What James particularly liked was to figure out and isolate the really useful numbers, the numbers that he said became language. The important numbers in baseball could be used, he figured, to express whatever ideas you wanted, like all language can. This sounds like an insane but maybe perfect way to think about sports, but it’s a bit of a dense and complicated idea. I’m definitely going to need Brad Pitt to explain it to me.
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Brought to you by the Alliance Film, Warrior, in theatres September 9th.
