It's Not A Basebal Movie; It's A Michael Lewis Movie

Rating: 9/10 (1 December 2012)

Judging from some of the reviews, many viewers did not get this movie. It isn't a movie about baseball any more than "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" is a movie about gold mining. The baseball is just a canvas that Michael Lewis used to paint his familiar themes that he has more commonly expressed in stories about Wall Street.
Anyone who has read Michael Lewis's other books, "Liar's Poker" and especially "The Big Short" and who has seen his extraordinary 2012 Yale commencement on Youtube address will have found the same themes running throughout his work; that people are often mis-valued because of luck and circumstances outside their control; that people are too easily fooled by appearances; that "convention wisdom" is often no wisdom at all; that it takes an outsider to see through the arbitrariness of "conventional wisdom; that the outsider going against the tide will be ignored or treated as a fool; that it takes an unusual person driven by some personal flaw or demon to stand apart from the unthinking mob and to persevere against the opposition. It is this last theme that is the real focus of his work what makes his stories so compelling.
The story of Bill Beane personifies all these themes. He is another version of the oddball lot in the 'Big Short", Mike Burry, Steve Eisman and the Boys from Cornwall capital who saw through the facade of the big Wall Street Banks went all in against them, and even the story of Lewis himself, who walked away from a sure multi-million dollar Wall Street career because he thought that it was all nonsense and would rather find a new "senior thesis." Billy Beane is another oddball outsider with the character flaw. Billy was a great high school talent, 6-4 the perfect picture of a baseball player. but was missing something that kept him from being the star that he was supposed to be. (The book explains much more of this when contrasting him with Lenny Dykstra, a small, 13th round draft pick who managed to make it big). At age 30, when still in his prime as major league player, albeit a fringe one, he quit and asked for a job at a scout, shocking just about every one from players to management. What character flaw leads a person to trade the wealth and fame of playing in the majors, the dream of players, fans and management, to become a bush league scout? It's easy to see why Lewis fell in love with the story.
Billy knows that appearances deceive because, after all, he was the perfect example. He was everything a star player was supposed to be in the eyes of the scouts - except he wasn't. He has suspicions about conventional baseball wisdom, but he himself has been baseball too long to completely come free of them. Then he meets a real outsider, Peter Brand, a Yale economics major who never played baseball and doesn't look like he ever could. Brand confirms Beane's misgivings about traditional wisdom when he explains precisely why appearances are so often wrong and why scouts and their conventional wisdom are based on a superficial understanding of what matters in winning. It all boils down to what Beane later describes as "selling jeans" - finding the right body, even the right face. Judging by appearances and ignoring real performance. Better yet, Brandt offers an alternative, using one of Lewis's other themes, they players are often mis-valued because of luck or other irrelevant circumstances, they pitch funny or they hang out at strip clubs, etc. Beane buys in, partly because of necessity and partly it confirms his suspicions. He not only selects players based on Brandt's ideas, over the vehement objects of old guard scouts, but he also goes so far as choosing a new head scout precisely because the man never played baseball and was untainted by conventional wisdom.
Then comes the next phases of Lewis's storyline, the scorn, laughter, and conflict with the insiders who see their position and self worth being questioned. Finally, there is eventual, if not complete, vindication. This leads to the film ending in two wonderful scenes. The Jeremy Brown video scene and his daughter's song both captured the spirit and the message of the film in a graceful ways.
In sum, it's a very nice movie of ideas. It certainly isn't about baseball. It's about how our view of the world and our judgment of other people and even ourselves is so often based on the wrong things, the surface things.
Note added: Most of the ideas that Beane used to select players in the movie had been learned from his predecessor as GM, Sandy Alderson, who is never mentioned in the movie. Alderson got them from reading Bill James, the godfather of the new statistical analysis who was contemptuous of standard baseball thinking. He wrote some really interesting and philosophical books on the subject of statistics and baseball while working as a night security guard at a pork and bean factory. He is also mentioned once, although Peter Brand is presumably meant to represent James+Paul DePodesta.