Though busy I have been during the recent months since my last post, I have still managed to wrestle away some free time to do what I love more than almost anything (save for maybe bare-knuckle boxing, knitting cat sweaters, and watching Judge Mathis)- enjoying great movies. Some are the classics that I am slowly trying to check off my list, some are Oscar hopefuls, and others fall somewhere in-between. For this piece, I am going to discuss Moneyball, the most recent Brad Pitt-featured sports drama.
I’ve always had something of a love-hate relationship with sports movies. Not to say that the “love” side of that equation doesn’t get equal attention; Rudy, Field of Dreams, and Remember the Titans are, in my opinion, some of the more fantastic movies ever made. When done well, they can inspire and tell a great story, and are often chalked full of fine acting performances (I say with pride that I’ve always been a sucker for Emilio Estevez’s Coach Bombay). Field of Dreams in particular will always hold special meaning for me, it also being one of my Dads favorite movies. Watching it with him is a treat, as he is a wealth of knowledge on the subject of baseball history, hitting the pause button frequently to tell stories of the 1920’s White Sox and how Shoeless Joe Jackson got his nickname. That all being said, for every good sports flick that gets made it seems as though they tower upon a mountain of 100 disastrous ones. Too often they try, in vain, to tug at the heartstrings of the viewer or beat you over the head with the proverbial stick of sentimentality, sacrificing the artistry or integrity of the film in attempts to draw a tear from the viewer as Samuel L. Jackson unites the inner-city high school basketball team with his preachings of tough-love.
The movie begins with an introduction to Billy Beane, the once-promising MLB rookie turned baseball scout turned General Manager of the Oakland Athletics; a team that, at the time, wasn’t on the radar as a promising baseball franchise, nor was it sporting the fattest wallet in the business. While other ballclubs like the New York Yankees had never-ending oceans of money in which to scout the top players and assemble an unstoppable force of athletes, the A’s had a fraction of the budget to work with, making the task of assembling a championship team a seemingly impossible one. Recognizing this, Bean begins to think outside the box, and a new and untapped option presents itself when he meets Peter Brand, a recent Yale graduate of Economics, working as a lowly researcher for the Cleveland Indians. Brand presents Bean with an alternative approach to baseball scouting: instead of dumping your entire budget on one or two top-hitting, steroids-riddled big shots (as most clubs were doing at the time), gather a larger group of players who have seemingly lower value, but who have excellent On Base Percentage (OBP), something that usually isn’t given as much attention as features like batting averages and career home runs when scouting new players. Predictably, the idea is met with enormous hostility from the owner and the rest of the A’s scouting staff. Forging ahead with the plan in despite of them, Beane recruits a team of washed up, under-valued, B-list athletes who, after overcoming a rocky beginning to the season, lead the A’s to 20 consecutive wins, a landmark record for Major League Baseball.
What makes this movie so unique is what it offers: a look behind the scenes. Baseball is as American as apple pie, country music, and Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast, thus the game itself is no longer much of a mystery to most of us. However, the business side of the sport is a side that most of us are unfamiliar with. How do ballclubs put together a team? How is it decided what new players have potential and exactly how much they are worth? Though this may initially not seem as glitzy and exciting a story as one featured on the game itself, it will captivate you. This is the direct result of superb acting and an even more superbly-written screenplay. Brad Pitt delivers his highest caliber performance since Inglorious Bastards, and even more surprising is the reserved, articulate character crafted by Jonah Hill, who has become synonymous with Judd Apatow-esque features and perhaps not taken seriously up to this point as a talented actor. The screenplay is one of the best in the history of sports dramas; the pace of the film is slow enough so the viewer can be absorbed into the story and really latch on, but fast enough to avoid becoming dull, a pit that seems like it would be easy to fall in to when making a movie about baseball statistics. Great acting, great script, great cinematography. It will surely be getting Oscar nods come February, but don’t wait that long to see Moneyball. If you do, well, you’re just un-American.
