I'll start with this: Moneyball is a very good movie. It's witty and very well-written (to be expected from Aaron Sorkin). It's much funnier than I anticipated. Brad Pitt's fantastic. Jonah Hill and Philip Seymour Hoffman are also great. The story is engaging and entertaining. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the movie, and would recommend it to others.
BUT. I find the movie to be factually inaccurate and historically misleading. Now, before you roll your eyes and tell me how every "based on a true story" movie is inaccurate, let me make my point by pointing out some other "based on a true story" sports movies and their relation to reality.
Movie: Miracle
Main point: The United States hockey team pulled what is probably the biggest upset in sports history by defeating the Soviets in the 1980 Olympics.
History tells us: Exactly the same thing.
Movie: Remember the Titans
Main point: A newly integrated Virginia high school must overcome a racial divide; the school's football team comes together as friends and wins the state championship.
History tells us: Exactly the same thing (well, I guess I can't confirm that anyone on the team was friends with anyone else, but they did overcome their racial differences to win state).
Movie: Rudy
Main point: A small, athletically and academically limited young man works his tail off to get a spot on one of the greatest college football teams in the country: the Notre Dame Fighting Irish.
History tells us: Exactly the same thing.
Movie: The Rookie
Main point: A high school math teacher & baseball coach in his 30s tries out for the major leagues. Against all odds, Jim Morris's arm gives him the opportunity to fulfill his dream of playing professional baseball.
History tells us: Exactly the same thing.
Obviously, each of these movies takes liberties with the truth. Reality was probably not as dramatic, or as funny, or as entertaining. But the main points of each of these movies is absolutely in line with historical reality. On the other hand, you have...
Movie: Moneyball
Main point: The GM of the low-budget Oakland A's changes the game of baseball when his team succeeds after he employs new techniques for evaluating players & finds a way to put together a winning team with one of baseball's lowest payrolls.
History tells us: Not really.
The film opens at the end of the 2001 season, as the A's (who had gone 102-60 that year) lose in the first round of the playoffs. In the offseason the A's lose a couple of their stars to big-money teams, and GM Billy Beane is forced to fill those gaps with very little money. He teams up with stat-keeping nerd Peter Brand and together they go against all the team's scouts and its team manager and hire misfits & nobodies who, they determine, are undervalued but can help them win. At one point in the 2002 season, the A's win something like 22 straight games to set a major league record (which is true, by the way). But then near the end of the movie, you watch as the A's (who had gone 103-59 that year) lose in the first round of the playoffs. So what did the "moneyball" strategy accomplish? Well, the A's won exactly one more game with it than without it. And they got just as far in the playoffs.
Of course, then the Red Sox try to hire Beane because they're so impressed with what he did with his Oakland club. So maybe in the long-run the "moneyball" strategy is the way to go? Well, Beane stayed with Oakland and here's what went down over the next decade:
2001 (year before Moneyball): 102-60, lost LDS
2002 (year of Moneyball): 103-59, lost LDS
2003: 96-66, lost LDS
2004: 91-71, no playoffs
2005: 88-74, no playoffs
2006: 93-69, got swept 4 games to 0 in ALCS
2007: 76-86, no playoffs
2008: 75-86, no playoffs
2009: 75-87, no playoffs
2010: 81-81, no playoffs
2011: 74-88, no playoffs
So, perhaps "moneyball" isn't the silver bullet the film makes it out to be?
Tellingly, the movie never mentions the fact that the 2002 Cy Young winner, Barry Zito, played for Beane's team. It also doesn't highlight that year's league MVP, Miguel Tejada, who also played for the A's. It focuses on the undervalued "misfits" like Chad Bradford and Scott Hatteberg, who were far less instrumental in the A's success than Zito, Tejada, and two other great pitchers, Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder.
The biggest problem I had with the stretching of the truth, however, came at the film's closing when a written sentence on the screen claimed that two years later (2004) the Boston Red Sox won the World Series "using Beane's philosophy." The claim is a boldfaced lie, and it disappointed me. The 2004 Red Sox had the second-highest payroll in the league (behind only the Yankees, who basically swim around in gold coins like Scrooge McDuck). Their roster included big-timers like Derek Lowe, Pedro Martinez, Curt Schilling, Tim Wakefield (and that's just the pitchers), Jason Varitek, Orlando Cabrera, Nomar Garciaparra, Kevin Youkilis, Johnny Damon (one of the stars the A's lost to the Red Sox after the 2001 season), Manny Ramirez, and David "Big Papi" Ortiz. If that's the "moneyball" strategy, then the movie does a pretty poor job explaining it.
I know I sound like a "scrooge" of some kind myself. But like I said above, I would recommend this movie for anyone who likes to be entertained, or anyone who thinks Brad Pitt is good-looking (*ahem* Elizabeth *ahem*). Its success, however, seems to play largely on the general population's unfamiliarity with the truth about recent Major League Baseball history.
Well put. If you look at the world series champions from 2002 until now you won't find a team without some deservedly high paid superstars. Some of them may not have been high paid when the won but they would turn out to be superstars after. There's not a team there that is compiled 100% of under rated has beens or newbies. And every champion team since the beginning of baseball has some under rated has beens or newbies. So I'm not sure what changed with the "moneyball" system. I think it is just a scientific explanation of things good GMs have been doing forever.
ReplyDeleteYour last sentence puts it well. I recently read 3 Nights in August. It's a book by the guy who wrote Friday Night Lights. He spent much of the 2003 baseball season with the Cardinals, and the book chronicles the details of La Russa's managing, particularly in a 3-game series in August against the Cubs. It talks at length about the way La Russa's mind works; how he analyzes players and match-ups, and every at bat his team has. It points out that although La Russa has probably gotten better and matured in his analysis over the years, he wasn't doing anything in 2003 that he wasn't doing 20 years earlier when he was a young manager. Moneyball is an entertaining look at the details of what every successful front-office guy has been doing for years.
ReplyDeleteI liked your summary of previous movies and how they stayed true to the Main Point of the story. I've yet to see Moneyball, but the Main Point as I think back on the early 00s A's is they were the team that confirmed casual fans like myself couldn't follow baseball that closely. Sabermetrics lingo helped me stroll right out of the fray. I could understand batting average, HRs, and RBIs. But having to learn about OPS, VORP, WAR, UZR, and FIP confirmed what I was already feeling. Baseball isn't that fun. The playoffs this year drew me back in, and that Freese guy was a fun story. But I didn't care to look up what the Cardinals saw in Freese's VORP and OPS+ to decide to get him for their team.
ReplyDeleteI love baseball, Lance, but I totally understand the sabermetric turnoff. And have you heard? The story this offseason is that now teams are starting to consider even more stats: CNN, AT&T, SOPA, LOL, OMG, LMFAO, and even WALL-E.
ReplyDeleteAs a minor "correction". Rudy has factual inaccuracies as well. Joe Montana, who played for Notre Dame during that time, has spoken to Hollywood's embellishment/adding of events.
ReplyDeleteUnderstood, Kyle, but my point is about the story's main idea. What I wrote above about Rudy ("A small, athletically and academically limited young man works his tail off to get a spot on one of the greatest college football teams in the country: the Notre Dame Fighting Irish.") is true, right? Moneyball's whole point is inaccurate.
ReplyDeleteFirst off I haven't seen the movie so everything I'm saying is based off of your description and the trailers I've seen (and I think we all know how well trailers summarize movies). I haven't even had time to read the book.
DeleteI think I agree a lot if not completely with Joel's comment that it's a scientific explanation of what many GMs have unofficially done for years. What I mean by unofficially is that maybe a GM watched enough of a batter to know that they struggle with a certain pitch or location, but they probably didn't bother to record actual stats on it to track it and then in turn to be able to quantify/pin point how much they struggle and/or whether any improvement is made. Conversely by quantifying strengths as well, you can more easily identify under rated players. Teams with big budgets can employ the same strategy to have success. I think where you may be right is that the movie does a poor job of explaining the Moneyball strategy. My understanding about Beane is that the strategy was more about player evaluation, and not as much of getting them for low priced contracts. It's just that with the budget he had in Oakland, he only had a low budget to work with, so his focus was on players who weren't already superstars who could demand the big money.
You point out Tejada, Mulder, Zito, and Hudson and how the movie doesn't really mention how they were part of the team, but if I remember right (and I may not) they weren't big name stars yet at that point either. They broke into the bigs with the A's and then became widely known and almost all of them went on to become bigger stars with other teams that did pay them more. While they were not acquired by Beane using the "Moneyball" system of player evaluation, they were also not traded, cut, sent down to the minors or anything like that.
While I think I understand your point that the money and low budget aspect is blown out of proportion. To the extent that the story is about a new way of evaluating talent or at least a new way of keeping track of player skills, it seems to be mostly on point and accurate. Though again, I haven't seen it.
So I guess my point of disagreement is they did have some winning teams, with a low budget. Doesn't that make the general overall storyline of the movie accurate? You show a decade of their records, they have winning (above .500) records until 2007. So Beane's strategy provided winning records for five years. Then teams with bigger budgets started taking their players, and/or using it to evaluate their own then the playing field leveled out again (or favored teams with more money) when it came to identifying quality players.
You dismiss embellishments, enhancements, or adding of events in other movies and accept them as being relatively accurate because the broader or more general storyline is true, but the same seems to apply for Moneyball. The broader story that a low budget team had winning teams with a GM who had new ways of keeping track of player attributes seems to be fairly accurate.
I refer back to opening paragraph, so feel free to completely dismiss this as way off.
Side note:It seems pretty good to me if you lose two super stars and win even just one more game than you did the year before. This would be like the Cardinals losing Pujols AND Holiday or Freese or Berkman, or Carpenter and still repeating as World Series Champions. It wouldn't be likely and even with just losing Pujols, many think the Cardinals will see less wins.
ZING! And Kyle wins the argument (the judges were unanimous)!
ReplyDeleteIt sounds to me like you understand the movie and its story line as well as you need to, and I confess, you've made me lighten up on my critique of it.
Whenever someone tries to tell me I'm closed-minded and can't be persuaded by solid logic and argumentation, I'll point them right here where I am publicly declaring my change of mind due to your comments. :)
I don't think your critique is completely off base, I mainly thought it was unfair or a poor comparison to list a few other sports movies based off of a true story, call them, "Exactly the same" as what history would tell us despite their obvious inaccuracies of some details and then slam Moneyball for glorifying low budget success to be more than what it really was.
DeleteWithout seeing the movie, I completely believe that they probably made it seem like the A's won all the time with low budget players when that wasn't the case, but I do think they probably had comparably more success than other teams with similar budgets and that you could attribute at least some of that to Beane's new way of tracking things.
I think you hit the nail on the head with your critique when you discuss the Red Sox and their success with the high payroll. With the movie hyping the low budget aspect, it would seem like a lie or mischaracterization to then say that the second highest payroll employed Beane's strategy to much success. I'm guessing you weren't the only baseball fan to see that and think What!? Here is where I had the advantage of not seeing the movie and the over emphasis of low budget being part of 'the strategy'.
You can also take credit for my understanding of the movie because I haven't seen it and I relied heavily on your own summary of it in the post.