It's a baseball movie. More than that, it's a baseball statistics movie, with its focus squarely on things like on-base percentage.
So "Moneyball" is a movie for true baseball fanatics, right?
Maybe not. Bennett Miller's dramatization of Michael Lewis's non-fiction book about general manager Billy Beane and the unlikely rise of the small-market, low-budget Oakland A's in the early 2000s, which opens on Friday, has picked up rave reviews in many quarters, including from lots of people who ordinarily couldn't care less about, say, OPS or VORP or even the American League wild-card race.
Also read: Review: 'Moneyball' Knocks It Out of the Park
But it has also picked up a measure of criticism – and much of that, it seems, is coming from the biggest baseball fans, who’ve long had problems with Lewis's book and who have the same problems with the film's omissions and oversimplifications.
"The chasm between the real story of Billy Beane and the manufactured one in the 'Moneyball' movie keep it from reaching the plateaus of its forbearers, no matter how slick the production, interesting the dialogue or arresting the cinematography," wrote Jeff Passan, a baseball columnist for Yahoo Sports. "It's just not a very good baseball movie."
I happen to think that "Moneyball" is a very good movie. It's a twist on the typical cliché-laden sports films, an appealing adult drama marked by a Brad Pitt performance that is a marvel of effortless charm and charisma over a tightly-wound interior.
But as a diehard baseball fan since childhood, I too have serious problems with a story that makes it seem as if Beane and his stats-geek assistant Peter Brand (a fictionalized version of Paul DePodesta, who wouldn't allow his name to be used) turned a small-market team into a winner through brilliant moves like converting broken-down catcher Scott Hatteberg into a first baseman and bringing in unconventional relief pitcher Chad Bradford.
Certainly, Hatteberg and Bradford contributed to the A's success. Certainly, the statistics-based model (called sabermetrics) promoted by Beane and "Brand" gave the A's an edge over some competitors, and went on to have an impact on the entire game in ensuing years.
But Hatteberg and Bradford are not why the A's won 103 games in 2002, including an American League record 20 in a row. You wouldn't know it from "Moneyball," but that A's team also contained the league's Most Valuable Player and its Cy Young Award winner (an honor given to the league's best pitcher).
If you’re making a movie about the success of that team, and you ignore its remarkable trio of starting pitchers -- Barry Zito (the Cy Young winner, right), Mark Mulder and Tim Hudson – to focus on Bradford, you're not telling the real story.
If you play up Hatteberg and completely downplay the league's MVP, shortstop Miguel Tejada, you're trying to put one over on your audience.
