A pleasant surprise

Rating: 8/10 (12 October 2011)

I used to love going to the Oakland Coliseum. Maybe it was only in comparison to Candlestick, but the Coliseum was a pleasant place to watch a ballgame. Then the Haas family sold the team, Al Davis moved the Raiders back from L.A., the Coliseum was enclosed and became an airless mausoleum with the ambient of a toiletbowl; since then, I have been to about half a dozen games in Oakland. Since being swept by Detroit in the 2006 ALCS, the A's have been caught up in a swirl of ineptitude. The current ownership, saddled with an inadequate facility and no clear prospect of finding a new home, have (unlike the Giants' management of the '80's, who brilliantly promoted a substandard product) spent the past few years actively discouraging people from supporting the team.
Billy Beane is part and parcel of the A's malaise. Beane was a scout's dream, a blue-chip high-school prospect, who was drafted in the first round of the amateur draft by the New York Mets (who used the first pick in the draft on another SoCal high-schooler, Daryl Strawberry); he might have gone higher in the draft, but teams were leery that Beane might accept a baseball/football scholarship to Stanford, where he would have had a chance to succeed John Elway at quarterback. The players chosen around Beane, Terry Francona and John Gibbons, would go on to become successful Major League managers, a class of people for whom Beane reserves his greatest contempt. Beane has increasingly made moves which have left the team in a constant rebuilding cycle, haphazardly dealing game-ready, club-controlled players for prospects, with the glee of a ten year old swapping baseball cards, or my coke-addled former roommate rearranging her bedroom. How acquiring Milton Bradley and Matt Holliday for Andre Ethier and Carlos Gonzalez fits in with the precepts of "moneyball" quite escapes me.
The scene in this movie which most adequately captures this "I'm more clever than anyone else" aspect of Beane is the four-way phone conversation between Beane, Ed Wade, Dave Dombrowski, and Brian Sabean (actually, a five-way conversation, counting hapless owner, Steve Schott, who is left on hold), during which Beane snags Ricardo Rincon. This is a high point. The somewhat more questionable trade which netted the A's Ted Lilly, and for whom they gave up Carlos Pena and Jeremy Bonderman, is glossed over. Brad Pitt does a very commendable job showing both Beane's arrogance, and his insecurities. Jonah Hill is sterling as the Paul DePodesta-based assistant, hiding from the realities of the game behind his glasses and his lap-top. Philip Seymour Hoffman gives a surprisingly nuanced turn as beleaguered and out-of-his-depth manager Art Howe. While looking nothing like Howe, he ably suggests Howe's befuddlement, humor and basic decency. And the narrative peak of the movie, the wildly improbable 20 game winning streak, was very deftly constructed. As a side note, a 20 game winning streak is almost the antithesis of "moneyball", and it's strange that it was spearheaded by non-"moneyball" players such as Miguel Tejada and Eric Chavez, the year after the A's lost the ultimate "moneyball" player, Jason Giambi,to the Yankees. Also, hearing the late Bill King's voice over the reconstructed game footage brought tears to my eyes.