Moneyball

How can you not be romantic about baseball?

Today is a holy day for me. Some people look forward Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Easter. I spend my year looking forward to Opening Day of the Major League Baseball season. In the words of Susan Sarandon’s classic monologue from Bull Durham: “I believe in the Church of Baseball.” No other sport is full of the romance, the history, and the complexities that make up America’s Pastime.

To celebrate Opening Day, I am writing about Moneyball. Moneyball isn’t my favorite baseball movie (a title belonging to Bull Durham). I’m not even sure if it’s my second favorite baseball movie (Field of Dreams gets the silver medal), but it’s the best sports movie of the 21st Century and is probably tied with The Sandlot as my third favorite baseball movie. Since you’re probably wondering, Major League and The Natural round out the Top Five (six) giving us a full rotation of baseball movie starting pitchers.

I fully understand that baseball isn’t a game for everybody. It’s famously know for being long, slow, and boring in an age when attention spans aren’t really a thing. I love the game and I love this movie. Whether you like baseball or not, I think Moneyball is a great film worth checking out.

Moneyball came out in 2011 and is based on the 2003 book by Michael Lewis. Lewis documented how Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, used analytics to build one of the most consistently successful teams in baseball despite having the lowest payroll in the sport. As I type this, I’m realizing that you may not know why this is significant enough to deserve a book and an Oscar-nominated movie. Allow me to explain….

There are four different classes in baseball (loosely based on Brad Pitt’s famous scene from the movie):

• The Rich Teams: Teams like the Yankees and Dodgers who can afford to pay the best players, therefore have the easiest path to building a winning ball club. For example, the Los Angeles Dodgers just gave generational talent Shohei Ohtani a ten-year, $700 million contract and they are already loaded with talent.

• The Poor Teams: Teams like my beloved Kansas City Royals. They stink either because they either can’t afford really good players or they can’t effectively utilize the methods of Moneyball or both. Some poor teams are good. My favorite team is not one of the good ones.

• Fifty Feet of Crap: Self-explanatory. It really smells over here.

• The Oakland Athletics: This is where I’m tempted to rant about the A’s greedy cheap ass billionaire owner and how he intentionally built a sorry excuse of a baseball team to cause fans to not attend games so he could easily move his team to Vegas. It’s shady as shit, but it’s a more recent occurrence and not what Moneyball is about. Just know that the Oakland Athletics have a greedy cheap ass billionaire owner who puts profit over winning baseball games. Billy Beane was a very competitive GM that tried to overcome that.

The crux of Moneyball is that Billy Beane revolutionized the sport by prioritizing certain statistics to build a team that could win baseball games despite the low payroll. You can’t pay stars so let’s try to get players that can get on base and getting on base leads to scoring runs and scoring runs leads to winning baseball. According to Jonah Hill’s character, Peter Brand, you’re not buying players, you’re trying to buy runs.

Side note: I just watched my baseball team get on base six times and score one run and they lost the game. They’re famously known for not being good at Moneyball.

So, does it work?

Yes and no. They build a winning baseball team…for the regular season. The Oakland Athletics break the record for longest winning streak and win their division, but lose in the first round of the playoffs. The Moneyball Oakland A’s never won a World Series, BUT multiple teams have used the same models for team building. The Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, and Houston Astros all won baseball’s coveted prize by prioritizing analytics. This further adds to the pain that Beane carries by not being a “winner.”

A. Bartlett Giamatti gave us one of my all-time favorite baseball quotes: “[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

This leads me to the main scene that I wanted to write about….

Billy Beane is heartbroken about another playoff elimination and he just turned down the Red Sox’s offer to be the highest paid General Manager in the history of the sport. Peter Brand attempts to console him. Brand shows Beane some baseball film with a deep message behind it. A very large in size minor leaguer, obviously not know for his base running, hits a ball far. He rounds first and falls flat on his face. He’s embarrassed even more than I was freshman year of high school tripping over my own feet while shooting hoops in the gym. The difference between this ballplayer and I? He hit a home run. Billy Beane and Peter Brand may not have won the ring, but they hit a home run. They revolutionized the game of baseball.