#109: Moneyball

Release Date: September 23rd, 2011

Format: DVD

Written by: Aaron Sorkin and Steve Zaillian

Directed by: Bennett Miller

4 Stars

If you watch professional baseball long enough, and closely enough, you realize how romantic it is. And meaningless.

Like life, we don’t know anything about baseball. 

We can observe it. We can analyze it, track it, record it. We can ask our elders if they’ve experienced something like this or that, and they’ll remember something from long ago. There might be advice given, or a shrug of the shoulders. 

Baseball leaves you in wonder.

Moneyball knows this deep in its soul. The film is about Billy Beane, a retired player now serving as general manager for the Oakland As. Forced to assemble a team with ⅓ of the player budget of teams like the New York Yankees, Beane hires an economist from Yale, Peter Brand, to re-evaluate just how baseball works. 

What if everything we know about baseball is wrong? Billy Beane suspects that just might be the case. He himself was a first-round draft pick, a 5-tool player who could do it all (throw, run, field, hit, and hit for power), and he was a failure as a professional. The scouts got something wrong. Brand even tells Beane he would have valued him as a 9th round pick, not a top prospect.

It’s a beautiful, philosophical film about flawed humans dedicating their lives to trying to grasp an elusive subject. Moneyball could just as easily be about Shaolin monks or arctic explorers. It’s a movie about pursuing something that you believe in on a transcendental level.  

In the words of Billy Beane: “It's hard not to be romantic about baseball. This kind of thing, it's fun for the fans. It sells tickets and hot dogs. Doesn't mean anything…I want it to mean something.”