This is something that American men are never supposed to admit, but here goes — I don’t care about sports. I never followed a team, I’ve never cared who won the Super Bowl or the World Series, and I can count on one hand the number of games I’ve watched from start to finish on television.
So it’s really saying something that I was riveted by “Moneyball.” And yes, it’s set in the world of pro baseball, exploring how Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane subverted the dominant paradigm by assembling a team of inexpensive, non-flashy players who could make it to base rather than spend millions on celebrity hot-shot ballers who might or might not deliver on the field.
But really, “Moneyball” is about throwing out the established conventions of doing business and trying something new. So it could be about the iPod or the Obama 2008 campaign or the Fox network’s decision to air new episodes of “Beverly Hills, 90210” during summer rerun season.
Also read: Can 'Moneyball' Hit a Box-Office Home Run If the A's Stink?
This isn’t a sports story, it’s a tale of bold visionaries, so it’s a perfect follow-up to “The Social Network” for screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, collaborating here with the equally acclaimed Steven Zaillian (“Schindler’s List,” the upcoming “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”). Baseball fans will, presumably, enjoy a peek behind the curtain of the 2002 season, but you don’t need to know a bunt from a sacrifice fly to enjoy the movie, any more than you needed to write HTML code to follow “Social Network.”
“Moneyball” begins with Beane’s disappointment at the end of the 2001 season — not only do the much-better-funded New York Yankees knock the A’s out of the playoffs, but Oakland is also about to lose its star players (Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, and Jason Isringhausen) to teams that can offer them higher salaries.
Also read: Baseball Fanatics Wonder: Is 'Moneyball' Fair or Foul?
Attempting to replace these stars with a minimal budget, Beane visits the Cleveland Indians head office and finds some unexpected talent: Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a number-cruncher who graduated from Yale with an economics degree and who has formulated an entirely different way of evaluating players. Brand doesn’t care about their confidence or their handsomeness or their fielding skills or their throwing arms — everything boils down to whether or not they can get on base, even if it’s by walking. The more players on base, the logic goes, the more runs scored and the more games won.
The scouts for the A’s refuse to believe that the process can be boiled down to statistics, but Beane believes in Peter’s theories, particularly since Beane himself was a once-promising young player who gave up a full ride at Stanford to play baseball right out of high school, only to disappoint once he’d made it to the big time.
