Hey Pete, why doesn't your boss travel with the team?

Rating: Null/10 (24 June 2013)

Directed by Bennett Miller, "Moneyball" stars Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team. When he loses three star players in one season, Beane is forced to rebuild his squad. The problem is, Oakland's owners are broke. Beane thus adopts a new strategy. He hires an economics guru, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), and uses a sophisticated sabermetric approach to analysing, scouting and acquiring players. Using this method he buys a number of "cheap" players, and uses them to win 20 consecutive games, an American League record.
"Moneyball" is at its best when it's telling a familiar, underdog tale. This is a David vs Goliath battle in which little guys go up against Big Money. Organised sports as a rigged game, "Moneyball" details the way in which money leads to an accumulation of power and so the amassing of resources to the detriment of others. This has led to one chunk of American film critics reading the tale as both an attack on capitalism and a love letter to Occupy Movements. Hilariously, another chunk of critics read the film as being a celebration of the "progressive power of free markets", "value creation" and "the rational, free, independent judgement of innovators". According to such oppositional views, the film either pities poor Billy Beane for being crushed by Big Money, or celebrates him for being innovative and making efficient use of underused, overlooked workers. The latter view offers the usual free market fundamentalism: competition promotes efficiency, innovation, forces employees to work harder and faster, urges employers to maximise the use of their capital, to make better use of dollar-to-talent ratios, and incentivises the use of those who don't command as much in labour markets. In real life, truth's almost the complete opposite (capitalism hampers innovation, progress, aggregate efficiency goes down etc).
Epitomizing the film's ideological confusion are readings related to its treatment of baseball. Several critics see "Moneyball" as highlighting how math, science and a very specific corporate logic "dehumanises" and so sullies sports. To such critics, Beane, who tries to calculate his way to success by collating statistics, has given birth to a kind of robotic, post-human, soulless game in which players are treated as a collection of reliably reproducible and measured machine traits. How dare Billy Beane!
But humans are and have always been machines. Beane's highly rigid method of analysis is no different to that of experienced coaches and selectors. Such selectors may seem to be choosing players based on instincts and gut feelings, but in reality are filtering players through their own formulae and algorithms. They may not know it, but they're making, or attempting to make, choices as rational as any computer. Beane's more rigid method merely forces us to confront how mechanistic humans always are, which of course is depressing. Indeed, "Moneyball" may be the most depressing ball movie out there, morphing American's two religions – capitalism and baseball – into a noxious, fluorescent-lit numbers game, humans born to be reductively tabulated, quantified and disposed of, all in the name of profit curves, "winning" and GDPs.
"Moneyball" was written by Steve Zaillian, who wrote "Schindler's List", and Aaron Sorkin, who wrote "The Social Network". Like "List", the film fetishizes the idea of a kind of "humanistic capitalism". It offers "more capitalism" and the "cleverer use of players/workers" as a solution to what are really problems of exploitation. If your best players/workers/ideas are constantly being poached by wealthier clubs, forcing you to become "organ donors to the rich", then suck it up and be a smarter Social Darwinist. This, of course, echoes Sorkin's "The Social Network" screenplay. Hinging on nerds vs bullies narratives, both "Moneyball" and "Network" pretend to offer critique, but really offer wolves dressed as populist sheep. Think out-of-the-box, harder and smarter, and you'll compete with the big leagues. It's the American way.
Incidentally, Billy Beane's role in elevating Oakland has been hugely over emphasised. The team thrived primarily because of superb pitching and not because of Beane's methodology. During the period displayed in the film, Oakland were second in the league in fewest runs allowed, but finished in the bottom half in runs scored. Why? Because of three dominant pitchers: Mark Mulder, Tim Hudson, and Barry Zito. All three wee early-round draft picks, highly scouted and were not selected using Beane's methodology.
Ironically, 20th century baseball has achieved a much higher level of competitive balance than most other ball games. Some attribute this to funding caps and "tax systems" which essentially divert profits to smaller teams. Indeed, the year 2013 also marks the first year to feature "competitive balance draft picks", which awards players, via lottery, to small-market, low revenue teams. Most find this kind of "wealth distribution" abhorrent, some find it a necessity, whilst most hardcore post neoclassical economists, a field now called thermoeconomics, find such acts to be a positively pointless gesture when talking in terms of systems as a whole. The fact remains, though, that the difference between top and bottom tier baseball teams seems, at least for now, to be narrowing (roughly a 20 percentage points difference, 10 points plus or minus, between the best and worst teams).
"Moneyball" was directed by Bennett Miller. It's a slick film, always fascinating and Miller keeps things moving at a fast pace. Unlike most baseball movies, Miller's action takes place behind the scenes, in boardrooms, cubicles and in front of computer screens and TV monitors. The film's closing title card states that the Red Sox would win using Beane's methodology, but this is a kind of lie. The Red Sox had the 2nd highest baseball payroll of 2004.
7.9/10 – Entertaining but thin. Worth one viewing.