This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Sept. 23, 2011 - I'll tell you this. Watching Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill cavort in "Moneyball" Thursday night was a lot more fun than watching Rafael Furcal and Jason Motte blow a four run lead to the Mets in the ninth inning of a crucial Cardinals game Thursday afternoon.
In recent years, the Cardinals have at least paid lip service to the new-fangled statistics-driven principles of Moneyball, even hiring a graduate of the Wharton School of Business to analyze players. But what statistics can possibly explain the fatal convergence of a skilled veteran shortstop like the Card's Furcal being farcically handcuffed by an easy double-play ball with a relief pitcher like Motte, who had given up fewer than two runs a game, suddenly being unable to get his 97-mile-an-hour fastball over the plate?
But back to the movies, if not to the National League playoffs.
"Moneyball" is the highly entertaining, somewhat fictionalized story of Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, who changed his way of doing business after losing in the 2001 American League playoffs to the New York Yankees.
In a strong scene early in the movie, sitting in the gloom of an otherwise empty ballpark, depressed and angry, Beane obsesses about the fact that the Yankee's payroll for players is three or four times larger than his. And to make things worse his three best players are leaving the team for free agency and big bucks elsewhere.
Unable to wheedle any more money out of the owner of the team, Beane hires a baby-faced Yale economics graduate, computer geek and baseball statistics nut named Peter Brand (Hill) to analyze players for him, hoping for an edge. He picks up misfits from the discard pile, both young and old, who possess statistical superiority in such previously ignored categories as On Base Percentage (as opposed to batting average). He forces field manager Art Howe (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) to play the former discards by trading away players Howe likes.
The A's begin the season with a spectacular run of losses but Beane perseveres and the rest of the season is history. You could look it up.
"Moneyball" is often very funny, with sharply pointed dialogue, as you would expect from a script co-written by Aaron Sorkin ("The Social Network"). (The other writer was fellow Oscar winter Steve Zaillian, who wrote "Schindler's List," and the graceful direction is by Bennett Miller, who made his debut with the wonderfully droll and melancholy "Capote.")
Pitt is superb, his casual air masking a very skilled actor. Like his friend George Clooney, Pitt is worthy of comparison to classic movie stars like Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart, actors who never seemed to be acting.
And it's good to see Jonah Hill again break out of rowdy farces, living up to the promise he showed in the deliciously strange independent film "Cyrus."
A subplot involving Beane, his beloved daughter, his estranged wife and her new husband adds humanity to his character, although the relationship is given too much time and space in the second half of the movie, and some scenes drag a bit. But there's lots of great baseball, actual film and video footage from a decade ago and skillfully reproduced action.
As you would expect from a well-made Hollywood movie, the film moves with rising and falling action in a rhythm that is emotionally effective, although somewhat predictable. Part of that is because the characters other than the two main protagonists sometimes seem like two-dimensional cardboard figures, figures that pop up in order to be shot down by Beane.
This is particularly true of Howe, who seems rather pathetic, and some of the other baseball traditionalists. There is a very funny and yet somewhat disquieting scene in which Beane meets with his scouts around a table. All of them are old and weathered and blind to the future, and Beane treats them with more scorn than they deserve. A later scene in which Beane fires a chief scout, although again very funny, is disturbing in the same away, and apparently was completely invented. But, despite its flaws, "Moneyball" is an engaging, amusing and sometimes quite touching movie, and baseball fans in particular should not miss it.
A postscript
The theme of the movie, and of the book on which it was based - Michael Lewis's "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game" - is that Beane and Brand and their statistical methods changed baseball, giving teams in small markets a valuable tool in their uphill battle against big-budget teams like the Yankees. And that to some extent is undeniably true. All teams now use more precise statistical analysis than they did a decade ago.
Smaller-market teams regularly do well these days in post-season competition. How much of that is due to "Moneyball?"
Two points might be worth considering.
One. Moneyball, as we learn in the movie, is generally opposed to the sacrifice bunt, in which the batter essentially gives up an out to advance a runner. But Mike Shannon is also an enemy of the sacrifice bunt, and Shannon is no statistician. He is an extremely knowledgeable traditional baseball man, like the scouts Beane scorns in the movie.
Two. Billy Beane is still the general manager of the Oakland Athletics. As I write this, I pause to look at the major league standings in the sports page. A week before the end of the season, the Oakland Athletics are buried in third place in the American League West, 16 games under .500 and 20 games behind the leader, the Texas Rangers, whose manager professes that he has never read "Moneyball."
Harper Barnes, the author of Never Been A Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked The Civil Rights Movement, is a special contributor to the Beacon.