Is baseball art or science?
The movie “Moneyball” asks the question.
Ultimately, we already knew the answer: Neither — it’s a game.
At its highest level it’s also a business. And an unfair one — largely because unlike America’s other major pro team sports of football and basketball, there is no salary cap. Since owners can pay whatever they want for the best talent, the teams with the deepest pockets enjoy a huge advantage.
ABOUT 10 YEARS ago, there was a seam in the sport’s economic universe waiting to be exploited. Some of the players who were best at playing baseball as we had previously known it weren’t the best at winning the game as it had evolved. And front-office types who were more comfortable with calculus and joysticks than fungo bats and radar guns figured it out first.
This flap was a product of the steroids era; when everyone’s hitting a lot of home runs, you can get good bargains on guys who hit a lot of home runs — as well as those who get on base a lot to score in front of them.
Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt in the film) was among the first baseball people with credibility to embrace the concept of looking much deeper than at traditional metrics like batting averages and ERAs to find the truly valuable players and bargains. He does the equivalent of buying knockoffs instead of Rolexes because they cost much less and tell time just as well for his purposes. He does this because he’s forced to, because the A’s don’t have the bankroll to compete with the Yankees and other big-money clubs for the big-name stars at the peaks of their careers.
IT ALL seems very clinical and perhaps cynical, and that’s why I was wary of “Moneyball.” I didn’t want to spend 2 hours watching a movie about numbers and the dehumanization of baseball; I’ve always been more interested in what Joe Morgan has to say than Bill James. Not that I totally discount sabermetrics; I just put more stock in what people who actually played think … and I know that putting together a winning real-life baseball club is a lot different than building a fantasy team.
But Beane is an intriguing subject — especially considering his background as a prospect tabbed for superstardom who never panned out as a player. Haunted by his past and challenged by the present, he nevertheless finds a way where the A’s can beat the system, temporarily.
The performances of Pitt, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as field manager Art Howe, are excellent, as you’d expect. Jonah Hill is on target as the brilliant young fish-out-of-water assistant GM.
A film of this topic could easily bog down into something unwatchable, but it never does. And it doesn’t get cartoonish and cliche-ridden like other sports movies.
It’s your basic underdog story done very well, minus the Hollywood ending. There’s no miracle on ice, no Hail Mary. But a big decision made for the right reason.
And you don’t even have to like baseball … or economics … to get it.
