Moneyball (the book) turns 20 soon. The movie unwittingly defines irony. It's still good!

In March, a friend and I did some write-ups about memorable baseball movies. If this post is too long for email, then click through for the whole enchilada.

Those sad words — what might have been — should be scrawled on the Milo affixed to Moneyball.

Please treat that not as a dig, but as a sad swing to mimic Sorkinian levels of pretense. Or the mildest of burns on a quite rewatchable movie sourced from the best-selling Michael Lewis book which was subtitled The Art of Winning An Unfair Game. The 20th anniversary of its publication will swing around on June 17, so this is one way of being out in front of any deluge of think pieces. The influence of Oakland Athletics’ analytics use and the idea behind it that Lewis explored in the book are part of the culture. Summarizing briefly:

1. The baseball culture war is winding down. Oh, so those nerds have been banished? No, Kenny Powers, we won! Front offices, with the possible exception of the Detroit Tigers, realized that getting on base and run-scoring is the alpha and omega of a good offense. The Cy Young Award goes to the best pitcher, regardless of their win total. That is the gist.

2. Like almost all conquerors, we got carried away. The analytics revolution bent the game. By 2021 and ’22, it was too hard to get a base hit, there were not enough balls in play, and pitchers were taking too long to deliver max-velo pitches.
   
   The pitch clock, fielding shift restrictions, and several other rules were adopted this season to get game times down into the 2-to-2½ hour range, which is the historical norm. It is early, but it is working.

3. The winners realized there is honor in making the losers feel better. That requires tolerating every ex-player turned scold who is channeling the “proudly ignorant rearguard action” that the late great Joe Morgan led against Moneyball.
   
   Never mind that Billy Beane had enough ability to play Major League Baseball. And many baseball ops nerds actually did play competitive ball.

4. Arguably every narrative in sports stretches for a Moneyball element. Everyone wants to be the one who claims to see what conventional thinkers underestimated and thus changed the game. It is a bit hacky, to be honest.

5. Serious Jonah Hill became a thing. Prior to Moneyball, he was a key player in the Apatow-verse of early 2000s comedy.

6. The Oakland Athletics now have an opossum living in the broadcast booth of the Coliseum. That seems self-explanatory.

The great What-If with the movie is wondering what a Steven Soderbergh-directed Moneyball would have looked like as opposed to the finished product directed by Bennett Miller, with (dwah!) Aaron Sorkin as a co-writer. Soderbergh was apparently in line early to direct.

Sony Pictures, ultimately, was looking for a movie akin to another Lewis adaptation, the Sandra Bullock vehicle The Blind Side (2009). So Soderbergh’s cinéma vérité style was not going to work.

That might have been for the best. A Soderbergh Moneyball would have had a longer runtime than a Red Sox-Yankees ESPN Sunday Night Baseball game in 2007. Just imagine the 20-minute scene where they discover the opossum in the broadcast booth. It would have only been in the rough cut; scissored out of the film after high-level meetings where Brad Pitt’s agent explains, ‘Mr. Pitt will not be upstaged by an opossum.’

That said, a Soderberg-length run time would have allowed for giving more play to the 2002 Oakland Athletics being blessed with dominant starting pitching and a league-MVP middle infielder.

Stay out of the weeds, sports fans

The one trap that sports media and fans fall into with fact-based fiction, apart from the How Dare You territoriality, is getting into the weeds about what did or did not happen. Those Reel vs. Real? listicles are cheap-and-easy content, and that seems to be all that matters nowadays. One gets it; the late great Canadian author Paul Quarrington, in his final novel The Ravine, had a term for that annoyance: bullet counting.

Bullet counting has its time and space. Just not when writers are revealing hard and dark truths about how institutions manipulate the human condition. All I know is the older I get, the more I discard the baseball nerd hat for the Lonely Loser Who Watches A Lotta Movies hat. (You can only imagine how they looked at me at Lids when I asked to have that embroidered on the side.)

As a movie, Moneyball mostly works. Also as a movie, it is the exact opposite of the type of ballplayer that low-budget Oakland prized. As detailed by Lewis in the book and transferred to the screen, Oakland needed to look for ballplayers whose skills were not undervalued by so-called baseball wisdom. They applied what many outsiders, and a few people on the inside, had long realized.

Essentially, the Big Shiny Things that used to draw media hoopla for a player — batting average and RBI, a win-loss record for a pitcher — were poor evaluative tools. They are largely team stats attributed to individuals. It is important to have Moneyball as a document of the faults the baseball thinking that is called "medieval" by fancy-stats nerd Peter Brand (Hill, four years after Superbad). Both Lewis’s book and the movie nail that part.

In the movie, Athletics general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) describes Oakland’s situation: “There are rich teams. There are poor teams. Then there’s 50 feet of crap. And then there’s us.” And now there is an opossum who has squatter’s rights at the Coliseum.

That helps set this up as a somewhat formulaic underdog story elevated by some smart dialogue. Big Shiny Things instead of subtlety. That is probably necessary for general appeal. It never touches why the Oakland Athletics franchise, in 2002 as in 2023, is in such a state.

We have needlessly complicated obscure analogy time for that!

The Oakland Athletics franchise is like a boarded-up century building in Hamilton, Ontario, the post-industrial city where I live. Social issues in Hamilton stem from being a speculator city that has a lack of right-sized properly priced housing. So much land and property is in the hands of big-business types who are quote, unquote just waiting for the right time to build. Oakland once had a first baseman named Daric Barton who has the same name as a notoriously rundown street in Hamilton.

Those Hamilton buildings, and the Athletics franchise, each have unique touches and bygone grandeur. Whether it was in Oakland, Kansas City, or Philadelphia, the Athletics toggle between disrupters and dumpster fire.

Presently, they are stuck in time as the latter while the team’s management throttle down on payroll and spending and waits for some city council rubes to go for their billions-upon-billions real-estate play that will involve a ballpark. The purist argument is that they should go back to square one on the north side of Philadelphia.

Oakland is the only MLB franchise outside of the South Bronx to win three World Series titles in a row. Rickey Henderson did most of his best work in Athletics’ green and gold on the way to becoming the sport’s greatest run scorer. Three of the top 20 home run hitters of all time — Mark McGwire, Reggie Jackson, and Jimmie Foxx — featured with the franchise.

They have challenged orthodoxy. In the 1970s, team governor Charlie O. Finley paid bonuses to his World Series-winning players (a good thing). At another stage, Oakland looked the other way when McGwire and Jose Canseco used steroids two decades later (viewed as bad, but DINGERS!!!).

The franchise was in one of its fecund periods when Lewis took up his study of Billy Beane and the Athletics baseball ops. Ninety wins across the 162-game schedule is a good season in MLB. Oakland averaged almost 94 over an eight-season span (1999-2006) and made the playoffs five times.

BillyBrad, and Point-at-Pete

The movie picks up with BillyBrad preparing for the ’02 season. The Athletics have just seen leadoff batter Johnny Damon and fence-busting slugger Jason Giambi both depart for the Evil Empires back East (Red Sox and Yankees, respectively).

Brand/Serious Jonah Hill, AKA Point-at-Pete, prevails on BillyBrad to try to “buy wins, not players.” One need not be a huge Seamhead to get the power-in-the-simplicity of, “He gets on base,” which BillyBrad and Point-at-Pete drive home to a room full of wizened baseball lifers.

That Job One for a batter to avoid burning one or more of their team’s 27 offensive outs seems elemental. I figured that out by 1989 when I was 12 and had Earl Weaver Baseball on the family Tandy computer. But that was the forest that ‘conventional wisdom’ largely dismissed. Focusing on stats instead of a player’s physical tools, health, and ‘make-up’ (the mental side) was heresy.

The Beane approach has been refined. The Houston Astros call their method STOUT — stats and scouting sharpening each other. And they have gotten on OK.

It upset the herd to see it captured in a best-selling book written by someone who is not a working sportswriter. In 2006, I sold my one-and-only magazine piece to Quill and Quire. The reporting included a chat with Lewis’s editor, Starling Lawrence, who was waiting for the final manuscript of The Blind Side.

Lawrence pointed out that Moneyball “scared people in the game.” I can still remember his point, “There’s even a blog called ‘Fire Joe Morgan’ simply based on the fact his reaction to Moneyball was so goddamn stupid.”

Joe Morgan was the game’s greatest second baseman. His first MLB team, Houston, infamously sent him away in one of the worst trades in baseball history. Over his first six seasons with the Cincinnati Reds, he got on base at a .429 clip with above-average power, prolific and proficient base stealing, and steady fielding.

He was still someone who thrived within the system. In a live chat on ESPN.com in 2003, he seemed to think Billy Beane had actually written Moneyball.

That inspired a blog “where bad sports journalism came to die.” You may know that Fire Joe Morgan was written pseudonymously by TV producer and writer Michael Schur. The last post appeared on Nov. 13, 2008.

That was right around the time of the housing crash that is the backdrop of Lewis’s book The Big Short, and also while Schur and fellow series co-creator Greg Daniels were developing Parks and Recreation less than six months out from its début on NBC. The series cast included Chris Pratt, who plays real-life Oakland ballplayer Scott Hatteberg, one of the ‘misfit toys’ featured in Moneyball.

Man, that really ties everything together.

Morgan’s flourishing miserably had company in 2003 and ’04. Remember the Toronto Star’s infamous “THE WHITE JAYS?” headline? In subsequent coverage, Star baseball columnist Richard Griffin claimed that the Athletics’ emphasis on on-base percentage would have kept Jackie Robinson out of the majors.

Robinson had a top-3 on-base percentage in the National League in five of his 10 seasons with the Brooklyn Dodgers. (His lifetime .410 is 39th-best in MLB history.¹) Which is it, Rich? Did you not know that in 2003, after having worked in baseball for 30 years, or were you just taking readers for fools?

In the first act of the film, Hatteberg is one of the players whom BillyBrad and Point-at-Pete target to replace Jason Giambi “in the aggregate.” Hatteberg is a Red Sox discard whose injured right elbow has finished him as a catcher. But he — “Guys, check your reports or I’m gonna point at Pete” — gets on base, and BillyBrad believes he can switch to first base.

The scouting room scene is indelible. It seemingly became possible due to director Miller making the call to cast some actual baseball scouts to play baseball scouts.

Lewis was present while the Athletics prepared for the amateur draft. To this day, a friend and I still reference, “Put a Milo on him,” which was the group’s shorthand for any player with character defects. But draft picks need to gestate over a few years in the minor leagues. Movies need tighter timelines than that.

The underdog formula is sold further through the first time Hatteberg is shown. Chris Pratt was not a big star in 2011. Media consumers probably knew him for his Parks and Rec role as childlike Andy Dwyer, who broke both his legs by falling in a pit.

But his first scene shows that the dude can act beyond looking handsome while taming CGI Dino Sores. Hatteberg is sitting at home, tight as a drum, around Christmastime. He gives off enough to tell you he is terrified about the possible end to his playing days and how he will be a good family man to his wife and their little girl.

BillyBrad and Athletics coach Ron Washington (Brent Jennings) show up to talk to Hatteberg about switching to first base.

That is the gold in this film. Moneyball has a lot of smart pieces about the importance of thinking differently. It also reflects why it is vital to resist becoming conservative after attaining success.

It also finds a way to have a big payoff despite an obvious limitation. The Beane-era Athletics never won a league pennant, let alone the World Series. They lost four winner-take-all division series games in a row.

Of course, those outcomes were convenience samples for everyone who wanted to reject Moneyball. Playoff baseball is an utter crapshoot. Seamheads take it in with a vaguely Gallic shrug and say, ‘Ya can’t predict baseball, Suzyn.’ Casual baseball watchers demand that Shirley something must be done!

Baseball success is in increments and margins. Please miss me with the basing too much on small samples and, oh my, the Blue Jays are never gonna live down 8-1.

But the movie needs something to drive home its point. The 2002 Athletics were a regular-season juggernaut. They tallied 103 wins, led by an MVP season from shortstop Miguel Tejada and Cy Young Award-winning pitching from lefty Barry Zito. That included an unheard-of 20-win streak that propelled the Athletics from being third in the wild-card race to 3½ games clear in a strong division by early September.

The 20th win in a row was an improbable comeback win secured by a ninth-inning home run by, wait for it, Scott Hatteberg. That actually happened.

That provided the cinematic flourish for a big finish, and there are some clever codas before (and as) the credits roll. For the record, in 2002 Hatteberg earned a third of his career value as the Athletics first baseman.

Ultimately, too many Big Shiny Things get in the way. So it goes with Aaron Sorkin. His ‘check out the big brain!’ dialogue reduces the actors to vessels. What is this 'Each character should have their own unique voice' of which you speak? And his movies always posit that the solution to every problem in the world begins with a white man giving a speech — cue elongated fart noise.

I enjoyed some of his stuff. But there were tertiary reasons.² And I am the kind of despondent-leftist depressive who should get off on his stuff.

The Sorkin touches are a lot. Nothing can ever be left for the audience to figure out on its own. In eight seasons of MLB competition between the ’02 season when Lewis followed the Athletics and the release of the movie, the better-bankrolled Boston Red Sox used an analytics-based approach while winning their first two World Series titles in four-score and some years.

The movie does not get into whether that puts the lie to any notion of the marketplace of ideas. It happens with makers, too. Someone else makes something life-altering, but someone else gets it to market and goes down in history. Google Antonio Meucci, the true maker of the telephone. But I digress.

So the movie brings in John W. Henry, the real-life governor of the Red Sox, to validate everything BillyBrad is doing. It is an egregious stunt casting that tells instead of shows.

The presence of Henry brings up that he took over the Red Sox in a shady franchise flip that preserved a pointless money-pit franchise in Miami and closed the book on MLB in Montréal. There has been a worse Montréal Screwjob, one supposes.

Howe, the other Giambi done dirty

Brad Pitt is good in anything. The other movie problem is real-life, flesh-and-blood sportspeople get reduced to mere obstacles to the glory of BillyBrad.

I can wave off a scene where BillyBrad, angered by a losing streak, comes into the team clubhouse and takes a bat to a boombox. Generally, in the grind of a long season in MLB, the GM and the baseball ops have their spaces. The ballplayers and on-field personnel have theirs. That has held even though control of the game has increasingly moved ‘upstairs.’

One deleted scene goes even further. It shows BillyBrad confronting manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in the dugout following a poor outing by lefty reliever Mike Magnante. Finding out that it was filmed damages suspension of disbelief.

Making Art Howe an antagonist of BillyBrad was utter fiction. Around the time of the film’s release, Hoffman told Esquire that he “actively did not play” Howe, and wanted to express his chagrin. It sucks when someone who does not deserve it gets sacrificed as a script hack.

The second person from the 2002 A’s who is mistreated is lefty-hitting outfielder Jeremy Giambi (Nick Porrazzo), the brother of Jason. Giambi is negatively portrayed as a noncommital player, and BillyBrad trades him to the Philadelphia Phillies.

It is impossible to look at that in-passing depiction benignly. Jeremy Giambi, who acknowledged in 2005 that he used steroids, battled substance use disorder. He died by suicide at age 47 in 2022. His death came about six months after he suffered a life-altering head injury; his postmortem did not show opioids use. No one will know why, of course.

The point there, based on dollar-store psychology, is that Jeremy Giambi likely cared. A lot. The movie not taking that care is a big error.

And the Teoscar goes to…

End of the day, Moneyball is an analog to Teoscar Hernández, the outfielder whom the Blue Jays recently traded to the Seattle Mariners. When he was on and racking up those team-stat RBI, Hernández was entertaining and fun. He was just not that good in the aggregate.

The movie has enough baseball touches to foster some authenticity. And the late great Bill King, the greatest play-by-play broadcaster most of North America never got to hear, appears posthumously since snippets of his calls are used.

This is worth seeing. Solid 8, 8¼ out of 10, but obviously with a lot of notes.

That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind.

1. Jackie Robinson is dead even, to the fourth digit, in career OBP with Eddie Stanky. Stanky befriended Robinson when they were teammates with the Brooklyn Dodgers. As player-manager of the St. Louis Cardinals several seasons later, though, he condoned his players using racial taunts against Robinson (source: The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn).

2. Jessica Chastain is really, really gorgeous in Molly’s Game. The Trial of the Chicago 7 was also the first movie I saw in an independent cinema in October 2020 between waves 1 and 2 of the COVID-19 pandemic.