Billy Beane’s roster-building gamble still holds up 15 years later

Bennett Miller’s Moneyball opens on a losing hand. The Oakland Athletics have just dropped the 2001 American League Division Series to the New York Yankees, the richest and most successful team in baseball. General manager Billy Beane doesn’t have the money to answer back. For the 2002 season he is handed a $41 million player budget. His three best players walk out the door.

That is the whole problem in one frame: a small-market club trying to compete in a sport that lets the wealthy buy the standings. Moneyball, released in 2011, is about what Beane did next. It runs 134 minutes.

Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Three players gone, $41 million to spend

Free agency strips the roster bare. Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon and Jason Isringhausen all leave for richer teams. Giambi signs with the Yankees, which is the insult on top of the injury.

Beane knows the traditional scouting playbook because he lived it. The New York Mets drafted him in the first round in 1980, a pick that persuaded him to turn down a Stanford scholarship. His playing career went nowhere. Beane doesn’t trust the old eyes-and-instincts method that once bet on him, and Brad Pitt plays him as a man running on grievance as much as strategy.

The pivot comes in a trade negotiation. Beane tries to move for the Cleveland Indians’ Karim García, and Cleveland refuses on the advice of Peter Brand, a Yale economics graduate working as a team advisor. Brand complains privately that Cleveland rarely listens to him. He tells Beane that baseball teams focus too much on individual players to win. Beane asks whether Brand would have drafted him in 1980. Brand reluctantly says no — not until the ninth round. Beane hires him on the spot.

Peter Brand and the numbers

Jonah Hill plays Brand as a quiet, uncomfortable numbers man, and the partnership is the film’s spine. Beane and Brand build their roster on sabermetrics, an unconventional scouting philosophy. With no money for stars, they chase one number: on-base percentage. They accept the sacrifices that come with it — base stealing, defense, batting average. They buy players the market has mispriced.

The shopping list is a roster of castoffs. David Justice, aging. Scott Hatteberg, an injured catcher. Chad Bradford, a submariner. None of them looks like a franchise. That is the point.

The resistance is immediate and it is internal. Head scout Grady Fuson gets fired. Manager Art Howe, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, is a central figure in the arrangement. The baseball community’s skepticism and resentment runs through the whole project.

The roster Beane built

The cast is deep. Pitt leads as Beane, and Hill’s Brand gives him a partner in the argument. Hoffman plays Howe.

Robin Wright appears as Sharon. Chris Pratt plays Scott Hatteberg. Stephen Bishop is David Justice, Reed Diamond is Mark Shapiro, Brent Jennings is Ron Washington, Ken Medlock is Grady Fuson, Tammy Blanchard is Elizabeth Hatteberg, Jack McGee is John Poloni, and Vyto Ruginis is Pittaro.

Two cameos are worth flagging. Director Spike Jonze has a small uncredited role as Alan, Sharon’s spouse. Bobby Kotick, then the CEO of Activision Blizzard, appears as Athletics co-owner Stephen Schott. Both are the kind of detail that tells you the production cared about texture.

What the film gets right

The screenplay has a strange history. Columbia Pictures bought the rights to Michael Lewis’s 2003 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game in 2004 and hired Stan Chervin to write it. David Frankel was set to direct, with Steven Zaillian writing, before Steven Soderbergh replaced him. Soderbergh wanted a semi-documentary approach — interviews with real athletes, real players and coaches portraying themselves.

That version died before its July 2009 filming start, put in turnaround over creative differences between Soderbergh and Sony about a last-minute script rewrite. Soderbergh left. Miller took over, Pitt became a producer, and Aaron Sorkin was brought in for rewrites. Zaillian and Sorkin share the adapted-screenplay credit. Filming began in July 2010 at various stadiums.

The tagline is “What are you really worth?” It is a good question to hang a movie on. The film is based on Lewis’s account of the 2002 season and Beane’s attempts to assemble a competitive team with half — or even a third — as much money as his rivals.

The case against the hype

Here is where this paper’s verdict lands. The parts of Moneyball that reach for conventional sports drama are its least convincing. The on-field sequences carry little weight, and the film seems to know it. This is a drama about an argument, and it stages that argument in offices and stadiums rather than on the field.

The performances hold it together. Pitt gives Beane a jittery, chewing-on-something energy that keeps a talk-heavy script moving. Hill is the revelation — he plays Brand without a single wink, and the movie is funnier and sadder for it. Hoffman does more with silence than most actors do with a monologue.

Ranking what the film actually accomplishes:

1. The Beane-Brand partnership is the most convincing working relationship in any sports film of its era.
2. The sabermetrics material is explained without condescension, which is rarer than it should be.
3. The clubhouse resistance gives the story a real antagonist instead of a faceless front office.
4. The baseball itself is the least interesting thing on screen, and the film knows it.
5. The cameos and the supporting cast add texture without stealing focus.

The film’s reputation as a masterpiece of the sports genre is slightly oversold. It is a very good movie about markets, ego and institutional stubbornness that happens to be set in a ballpark. That is a narrower achievement than the consensus suggests, and a more durable one.

Moneyball is a smart, well-acted, occasionally cold film that treats its audience like adults and its subject like it matters. It does.

Billy Beane · Brad Pitt · Jonah Hill · Moneyball · movie review · Sabermetrics