plug: Moneyball (2011)

Baseball + math's way of showing how the inequities in our capitalist systems are aided by the death-grip of tradition.

The Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series last week with a team that, according to FiveThirtyEight, is “one of the best baseball has ever seen.” The Dodgers spent a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to win the World Series, Los Angeles’ first since 1988, the year I was born. It was also the same year Billy Beane, a young MLB player who had failed to meet high expectations and was widely considered a bust, signed to the Oakland Athletics.

This is significant because the Dodgers’ 2020 World Series win comes in an era of baseball that has been shaped by Beane’s reimagining of the sport in the early 2000s, a story told in the biographical sports drama, Moneyball.

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (Steven Zaillian shares a screenwriting credit), director Bennet Miller, and Brad Pitt, who plays Beane, somehow manage to make two of the most boring subjects in the world — math + baseball — and use them to illustrate how the inequities in our capitalist systems are aided by the death-grip of tradition.

“The problem that we’re trying to solve is that there are rich teams, and there are poor teams. And then there’s 50 feet of crap, and then there’s us,” says Beane to his staff in 2001, now the general manager of the Athletics. See, in 2001, the Yankees spent $122,287,143 on its roster, the most in all of baseball, while Beane’s As spent $33,810,750, the second-lowest of all MLB teams.

Beane is in a room full of old baseball scouts, the kind of guys who evaluate baseball players based on how good their swings look, how ugly their girlfriends are, and whether or not a player has a big dick. Naturally, they don’t give a shit about Beane’s problem. Who cares if rich teams win and poor teams lose? Sorry, but that’s baseball, lil’ bitch.

So this is what Beane is dealing with when he meets Peter Brand, a young Yale economics graduate (played by Jonah Hill) who explains that because baseball owners and managers are so lost in tradition they end up simply solving their problem of how to win baseball games by throwing money at it. Or, as Brand puts it, “There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening.” He then apologizes for telling the truth.

Again, on the surface, they’re talking about math and baseball, but underneath is the running idea that subjective, old ways of thinking contribute to unfair systems that reward the rich and punish the poor. Moneyball makes a case to “find value in players that nobody else can see.”

“People are overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws. Age, appearance, personality,” says Brand. To me, it’s the thesis of the film, and, more than the technocratic-drive towards efficiency and obsession with winning, what makes it an alluring story.

Moneyball isn’t without its pitfalls, of course. The chief one being Sorkin’s lyrical, soft-focus telling of the story. On The Big Picture podcast, The Ringer’s Sean Fennessey calls Aaron Sorkin our Shakespeare, which is both fitting and annoying given his penchant for selling viewers his brand of movie-magic liberalism. This, and the fact sports fans are still arguing over the film’s inaccuracies and liberties. Not to mention that the management for rich teams began evaluating the same way and soon tipped power back into their favor.

Still, I think Moneyball is a good film to revisit, or finally knock off your meaning to watch list for its romantic vision of baseball, math, and finding the value in people that nobody else can see.