Baseball Movie or Movie With Baseball In It: Moneyball
As we draw even closer to the start of the MLB regular season, it’s time to take a look at another movie and decide if it’s a “baseball” movie or a movie that has baseball in it.
I went a little easy on myself last time, picking Field of Dreams to discuss. It goes without saying, but that was an easy baseball movie decision. This time, however, I’m going to lean a bit more into the premise and look at a movie that poses more questions about its baseball-ness. That movie is 2011’s Moneyball starring Brad Pitt.
The movie, and the book it’s based on, covers the 2002 Oakland A’s season made famous by a change in the way that baseball experts looked at the game itself. A’s general manager Billy Beane, portrayed by Pitt, is a former player gone bust who needs to replace departing star players. Unable to compete financially being a small-market team, he turns to statistics to help him pull off an improbable run and forever changes the game of baseball.
The Netflix description out the way, what we are going to look at is whether the focus on stats takes away from the baseball of the movie. When the players themselves don’t really matter as much, is it really about the game?
Why It’s A Baseball Movie
The movie is about baseball insiders and assembling a competitive team in ways that are ubiquitous in the MLB now. The statistical analysis known as sabermetrics introduced by Beane and his team has become the norm for all levels of baseball and is much a part of the game now as the seventh-inning stretch.
We are let into the world of baseball executives and the decisions that they have to make that affect the lives of players everyday. The scene where Beane trades away players and informs them of the decision further underlines the impermanence of the game, as well as the importance of team cohesiveness. These are themes that are especially present in baseball as opposed to other sports, due to the fact that there is always the possibility of being sent down to the minors for a player at almost all times.
Along with these behind-the-scenes moments, Beane’s relationship with the game is heavily explored, charting the career trajectories of the thousands of players who never quite stuck around in The Show. His struggles as a player informs watchers on how merciless the game can truly be. A five-tool player that is a can’t-miss can languish in the minors and be in and out of the league in a few years.
Perhaps the most baseball part of the movie to me is Beane’s superstition. He doesn’t watch games in person, something he doesn’t break from until the team wins 19 games in a row, tying a major league record. He is convinced to attend the next game by his daughter and the team is up by 11 runs when he arrives in the fourth inning. Their opponents rally back and Beane retreats to the gym where he superstitiously watches most games. Thanks to a walk-off homerun, the team wins and breaks the record.
Superstition is extremely important in baseball. It could be something as simple as not stepping on the foul lines or as serious as not washing a lucky pair of socks for an entire stretch of a season. There’s the rally cap for when the team is down and not talking to a pitcher who’s in the middle of throwing a no-hitter or perfect game. Jason Giambi wore a gold thong when he was in a slump. Superstition is a part of the game on a level like no other sport.
Why It’s Not A Baseball Movie
When you cut through all the baseball jargon, the movie is really about statistical analysis and implementation. In fact, in the scene where Beane introduces the new way of player evaluation to his scouts he says about a potential replacement player at first base, “He can’t throw and he can’t field, but what can he do? He gets on base!” The player as a whole doesn’t matter because the stats say so.
Moneyball is also a revenge movie in a sense. Beane is trying to upend the institutions of baseball that let him down. We see in an early scene that he had an opportunity to attend Stanford on scholarship, which he turns down after Mets team scouts assure him that he will be successful. After failing as a player, Beane works his way into a GM position and is once again failed by the game when the traditional ways leave him with a shell of a team.
Beane’s use of sabermetrics is as much about thumbing his nose at the old ways of the game as it is about winning games. Beane’s quote in the movie, “Adapt or die,” is about doing what is necessary to field a competent team, but it also serves as a warning. Beane is going to change the game and prove that he knows better than the old heads in baseball. He’s a scorn man who’s showing off his new girlfriend to his ex.
Final Verdict
Moneyball as a baseball movie is not what we would expect when compared to movies like Major League and Field of Dreams. Where those films told us a story about the spirit of the game and the relationship that players and fans have with the sport, Moneyball was about the process.
You always hear the cliché about “how the sausage gets made” when you see the boring or unpleasant truths of how things happen, but Moneyball manages to do something different and make it interesting. Baseball has always been about stats, like batting average and earned run average, but that can be cumbersome. What Moneyball does is take the mundane part of the sport, turn it up to the nth degree, and use it to make us root for the underdogs.
It may be a baseball movie for baseball nerds, but it’s still a baseball movie.
