Don't roll your eyes like that, you knew this had to happen. It was my duty to review the movie about sports nerds. Well, maybe it wasn't, but an Oscar-nominated movie about sports nerds is intriguing. I am a believer that nerdism is an integral component of a successful sports team. You need more than talent alone to win championships, you need a strategy based on hard data and I believe GMs and team owners agree with me. MONEYBALL is loosely based on a non-fiction book wearing the same name. It's a pompous movie that makes a big fuss about a story that's not that good. Not that Hollywoodian. I'm going to commit a reviewing sin here and declare that MONEYBALL is a bit stupid.
So, MONEYBALL isn't exactly about sports nerds. It's about Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), general manager of the Oakland Athletics, a guy who listened to a sport nerd/statistician and adopted an analytics-based management strategy. After losing star players Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon and Jason Isringhausen to free agency, Beane figured he could never replace them with equal talent, so he turned to the strategy of Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a young mathematician he met in the Cleveland Indians' office. Brand is an apostle of Bill James' philosophy of sabermetrics. If Beane and Brand cannot replace the three lost superstars athletically, they can replace them statistically. Despite being the laughingstock of the league for their boldness, the Oakland Athletics start winning somehow. A lot. For a certain time, anyway.
I'm sorry if you loved MONEYBALL. I'm sorry if it moved you to tears, please know that I didn't mean to call you stupid. But the very idea of this movie is, and please follow my dirft here. Analytics are pretty much a part of the today's game. They are useful, but Billy Beane committed a huge logical fallacy in building his entire team a blind faith in numbers. Analytics are meant to give you objective information about players, you still have a judgement call to make about them
For example, Brand tells Beane to hire Chad Bradford, the most undervalued relief pitcher. He is undervalued due to the subjective judgement that he throws the ball funny. But it's that same fact that makes him a statistically efficient pitcher. It's tough to predict your swing when the ball comes from such a strange angle. That was a smart analytics-based hire. Then, they hired Scott Hatteberg and David Justice because they got on bases a lot. In these cases, they blindly trusted the stats. Results? Justice retired a few months later and Hatteberg, while being affordable, was never a very efficient pick up *. Beane built his entire team on arbitrary statistical calls like that.
random soulful moment of doubt in MONEYBALL.
MONEYBALL is trying to milk every ounce of drama out of a story that's actually pretty depressing. The Athletics went on an unexpected winning streak, finished first seed for the playoffs and that was that. Nothing amounted of it. The entire world of sport was awakened to the use of analytics, started using them smartly and Beane is still today in Oakland, trying to win his first championship. The last half-hour of MONEYBALL literally consists in Brad Pitt walking into random places with a worried look on his face, debating whether or not he'll stay with the Athletics. I mean, the season was over. There was no more baseball. The last half-hour of the movie is basically milking one ridiculous decision out of proportion. That's all there is to MONEYBALL, the movie. The misuse of a clever idea and lots of footage of Brad Pitt worrying. The amazing Philip Seymour Hoffman plays in this movie and you see him like four time.
That was a quite nerdy review. I apologize for that. The birth of sabermetrics/analytics is an important moment in sports. It made the game better, more competitive and more exciting for us fans as the most efficient players were put forward. But MONEYBALL shows the ridiculous lack of perspective you would expect a Hollywood, Oscar-nominated movie to show on the subject. It's a distorted and rather empty portrait of something that didn't quite work out. It's a long movie that attempts to engineer drama and tension, yet fails over and over again. Analytics are not very dramatic. Leave them to cave-dwelling sports nerds. There are better sports stories to be told. I'm sure you weren't transported. I'm sure nobody really was.
* The reason why Justice still got on base a lot probably was his veteran's patience which resulted in his retirement. In Hatteberg's case, his on base output was never really based on his batting success, so here goes your efficiency right there.
