A Retrospective Review of Moneyball
“How can you not be romantic about baseball?” asks Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) in the penultimate scene of Moneyball, echoing his earlier declaration that “it’s hard not to be romantic about baseball.” Perhaps the reason the theme gets underlined is because the makers of Moneyball themselves ran into this problem a lot during production. Indeed, the source material, Michael Lewis’ Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, is about as unromantic a look at the sport as you can possibly get. The whole point of Lewis’ book (and Beane’s theory) is that scouts have to ditch all their romantic notions about what makes a great player (who’ll draw a crowd? Who’s likely to be a fan favorite? Who looks like a hero?) for more practical and frankly less sexy criteria (who gets on base a lot, even if that just means being walked or bunting?). As a result, Pitt’s rhetorical question was probably a very literal disciplinary guideline for the screenwriters: How can we not be romantic about baseball?
Because the standard sports-movie cliché is that a team of losers gets thrown together for a crack at the title, and either a) wins said title against all odds due to their teamwork, or b) loses, but that’s okay because winning isn’t everything. What’s important is that the players stuck together as a family and learned something. Moneyball is, of course, just the opposite: winning is the only thing that matters (as the subtitle of Lewis’ book suggests), and the players are more or less interchangeable. They certainly don’t mean anything to Beane, and they definitely don’t mean anything to economist/whiz kid Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), who sees them as statistics instead of human beings. This is not a criticism of the film, it’s merely the truth, attributed to the fact that Lewis’ book was (like his excellent Liar’s Poker) not a heartwarming triumph-of-the-will sports story but a clinical, economical meditation on a new way of thinking. The book is great, so it’s not difficult to see why it got optioned, but it must have been a headache to put onto the page. How do you make this mathematically-heavy work into a film?
One good solution was to hire Aaron Sorkin to help write the script. Sorkin is adept at writing characters who think and speak logically, and at its best moments, Moneyball resembles his previous work, The Social Network. Network looked at the development of Facebook mechanically, near-autistically, refusing to seek touchy-feely justification for Mark Zuckerberg’s cutthroat startup of the world’s largest social networking site. He was just a really smart dude who saw an opportunity and solved it creatively, without letting something as silly as a personal relationship with, well, anyone get in the way. In Moneyball, you can see Sorkin’s hand in such scenes as Billy Beane teaching Peter Brand how to break the news to a player that he’s been traded. You have to remember it’s a business, Beane tells him. Don’t talk to them, just get in and get out—would you rather get shot in the back of the head or take six in the chest and bleed to death? (“Are those my only options?” Brand mumbles). Over and over again, Beane gets obsessed with Brand’s statistical approach to scouting players, trading them on the phone with other general managers as though the players are baseball cards, with no regard for the fact that his picks have moved their entire lives to Oakland based on Beane’s drafting.
That’s heartless, sure, but it’s honest—that’s what really happened, anyway, and it’s a ruthless and—yes—unromantic way of going about things. But unfortunately, the film is stuck on this idea: it wants to answer the question “How can you not be romantic about baseball?” with, “You can’t.” And so it ends up doing this weird thing of actually trying to make Beane into a romantic hero, a very romantic hero, which is where the other screenwriter, Stephen Zaillian (Schindler’s List, Awakenings) comes in. How do we turn a guy who basically disregarded the personal lives of every player on his team into a sympathetic protagonist? Give him a daughter!
And, okay, I’m sure Billy Beane really did have a daughter and whatnot, and he probably cared a lot about her and wanted to make her proud of her daddy and send her to college and blah blah blah (“I have a daughter who I’d like to be able to send to college,” Beane actually says in the film, immediately after making one of his most ruthless decisions, in a (failed) effort to take the sting out). But the problem is that the film gets confused, almost arbitrarily from scene to scene, about whether it wants to be a heartwarming story about a loving dad and unappreciated general manager who did something spectacular, or whether it wants to be a cold, clinical look at a guy who said, “Fuck lessons. I just want to win.”
This is probably why we hear, almost ad nauseum, voiceover from the doubters and haters, negative Nancies who are supposed to sound like priggish stick-in-the-muds, but who say actually kind of touching things like, “You can’t win baseball with statistics. You win it on the field, you win it with good players who can work and learn from their mistakes.” Granted, maybe they’re wrong (not even maybe, they are wrong, seeing as how the Red Sox won two years later ignoring that advice and taking on Beane’s method), but they’re at least championing the idea of Heart over Tenacity, because they don’t know how not to be romantic about baseball.
How can you not be romantic about baseball? I’ve found it pretty easy, actually (I don’t watch it). But the film can’t resist it, and we end with this shot of Pitt driving away in his car, listening to his little girl sing a song to him, tearing up, because by instituting the A’s winning streak, he’s managed to stay in Oakland and watch her grow up. I think we’re supposed to be touched, but I think (and I’m right) that he’s kind of an asshole who favored his own self-preservation over the welfare of everyone on the team, so the part that resonated with me much more was when his daughter, teasingly, starts singing, “You’re such a loser, Dad.”
Maybe I’m just unromantic.
7/10
About Ted McLoof
Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.