I should start by stating I’m not an avid baseball fan. I watch the playoffs, but not religiously. I don’t like fantasy baseball, all the freaking stats baseball people keep, and I don’t give a shit if anyone is on steroids. So, baseball people freak out a little when they talk to me. To them I’m a Martian.
All that said, I love a good baseball movie. Major League is still one of my favorite movies; and if you haven’t seen Long Gone you need to quit reading this and go to your friendly neighborhood illegal download and watch the awesome. For all the bullshit, baseball can still be magic. Hence, why I watch the playoffs.
I do enjoy the premise of the film. Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), GM of the Oakland A’s, comes to a realization several days into a rebuilding project (he’s just lost Damon, Isringhausen, and Giambi to free agency). He realizes it’s stupid to play the game the same way as the Yankees who have 4-5 times his resources. He doesn’t have the luxury of doing things the same way. He has to be cheap in every sense of the word.
He retains a highly overqualified statistician from the Indians (Jonah Hill) and begins to approach players in a different light. They determine a minimum run total the team must achieve to win a minimum number of games Jonah projects will get the team into the playoffs. So they have to score x amount of runs and allow no more than y amount of runs. And they determine that the most important statistics that result in runs scored are on-base percentage and to a lesser extent, slugging percentage. So when they‘re looking to replace Giambi; they don’t look for a similar talent. They look to replace his contribution to the team’s on-base percentage. So they don’t look to buy players, they look to buy runs.
Similarly, they ignore several hallowed baseball standby’s. For instance, they completely ignore the dominant hand of the player. Statistically it didn’t seem to matter whether the pitcher was a righty or lefty; so they just looked at the on-base and slugging percentages against him.
These new innovations lead to a different value scheme for players and the A’s were able to field a very competitive team playoff team even with their low budget and the loss of 3 marquee players.
The interesting thing is that the antagonist in the film isn’t the Yankees, its not an opposing coach or team or scout. The antagonist is baseball itself. Baseball culture is highly resistant to change. The scouts on Beane’s team all rebelled against his new system and the head scout even quit. The new format completely ignored their opinions and focused on obscure (at the time) quantitative data. Beane isn’t too sorry to switch focus from the opinions of scouts since he views himself as a prime example scouts don’t know shit. (Billy was a major league prospect and ignored a scholarship to Stanford to play for the Mets because they told him he was a can’t-miss talent. He never really amounted to anything in pro baseball [as a player]) Jonah Hill at one point theorizes that unless they actually win the world series; baseball would try to bury what they accomplished because it didn’t fit in with established baseball culture. He was half right. According to the film, the Red Sox were paying very close attention and would later adopt Beane’s system as their own. And something about a fat dude’s curse ending. I don’t know, apparently it’s in a Steven King book.
All in all this was a decent film. I like the story of kicking the dust off baseball culture and trying to update it. History isn’t usually kind to the originators of new ideas (until they’re safely dead) but Mr. Beane and company deserve some credit for trying something new in a game where nobody ever ever does.