Too much Pitt, too little baseball

Rating: 6/10 (3 December 2011)

I will comment first on the movie as a movie and then on sabermetrics.
The movie is a typical Hollywood ego picture for Brad Pitt, who is an Adonis to be sure, now if he could just change his smug expression once a while, when not looking into a mirror. Fortunately, the screenplay does not ask much of him. Fat Boy does the nerd-lifting, leaving Pitt free to spit, grin, punch telephones (which work faster if punched), pump iron, drive a gas guzzler, and other macho pursuits, though strangely no women. Fat Boy stares at the video, enters the data, runs the algorithms, produces the spread-sheets, and spouts the numbers. Evidently a Hollywood leading man cannot be seen reading data or studying a problem.
The screenplay sets up tensions that are painfully obvious and contrived and then abandoned, first with the scouts and then the manager. Neither of these is resolved, they simply drop out. A careful viewer will conclude some of the scouts resigned or were dismissed. But it is just guesswork. Likewise the manager, who looked painfully bored by the whole thing, is an obstacle and fades away.
Endowing Pitt's Beane with a double back-story is another Hollywood standard to keep the focus on the lead. The first back-story is Beane's own baseball career. The second is the ex-wife and daughter. Neither contributed to the storyline and both were poorly done, but they gratified the need to make Pitt into some kind of sympathetic hero, since his acting is not going to engage us. Sabermetrics got into baseball without need of these stale conventions.
In fact, Sabermetircs has been around a long time and there have been others in baseball who have taken an interest in it, including Beane's predecessor in Oakland. So Pitt's Beane was not the singular voice of reason presented here. Moreover, Sabermetics does not produce a single number as Fat Boy is made to say. It produces many, maybe too many, for most purposes. Specifically, On Base Percentage (OBP) is certainly important, but the film presents it as the absolute. As anyone of those scouts who are deprecated in the film would say, a team can put two runners on base every inning and never score. A few, clipped scenes where Beane and Fat Boy talk to players about specifics is good but not enough to balance the matter.
Sabermetrics has the most to offer strategically. It makes sense for a general manager to consider that kind of data. The essential difference between sabermetics and the orthodox baseball data is that the former factors in games won, whereas the latter are always isolated absolutes. A batting average, an RBI total are taken alone and out of context. There are batters with impressive averages and big RBI totals whose hits and runs batted in come in 11-0 routes, and never in 2-2 ties. At the end of the season they have big numbers.
Neither OBP nor RBI total are absolutes. As to OBP, since it is the focus of this movie to the extent it has focus apart from Adonis, tactically, to win a game it takes more than a high OBP or RBI total. In the bottom of the ninth, with one out and the tying run at third, a batter who gets a walk does not win the game. But maybe a batter who can hit a high, long fly ball for a sacrifice or maybe a batter who knows how to bunt, they can win the game. The skill set does come into the equation to produce those numbers and a naif watching the movie would never know that.
I will certainly concede that baseball has long been the most hidebound and inward looking of the professional sports. Professional basketball and football have been much more open to social and technological change than baseball since the year dot. Moreover, baseball has always been replete with numerical data which has been subjected to only the most primitive analysis, e.g., batting average, or earned run average. Making more use of the data available does make sense. But the movie hardly indicates how that is done. There was just too little baseball.