| For the Love of "Moneyball" |
| By Sally Haase January 23, 2012 This weekend I finally got to see the movie ‘Moneyball” starring Brad Pitt as the Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane. The movie tells the story of the 2002 Athletics and how Beane rebuilt the team after the defections of Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, and Jason Isringhausen for basically just peanuts. Beane took an interesting path to the GM job in Oakland. He was a star athlete in high school and highly recruited by major league scouts. Beane was known among the scouts as a five tool player, meaning Beane could hit, run, field, throw, and hit with power. Beane had a full scholarship to go to Stanford but chose to sign with the New York Mets after the Mets drafted him high and offered him a big signing bonus. Beane’s promise quickly tuned to disappointment when he could not adjust to the major leagues, he spent most of the late eighties bouncing from the Mets to the Minnesota Twins, to the Detroit Tigers, and ending his playing career with the Athletics. Beane quit playing and became a scout for the A’s and worked his way through the organization to the General Manager position. Beane was convinced that the scouts had it all wrong in looking at players and wanted to change the way people build a baseball team. The movie is based on the book of the same name written by Michael Lewis and it follows the Bill James mathematical formula of determining who will be the best player for the money you have available. In the movie there is a meeting with the scouts and Beane on finding new players to replace Giambi. The scouts look at things like how good-looking the player’s girlfriend or wife is and using that as a gauge of the player’s confidence level. What the scouts were looking for was basically a carbon copy of Giambi and Beane, knowing what his budget is, knows they cannot find another Giambi and he suggest looking at other factors. Enter Peter Brand, as he is known in the movie or Paul DePodesta, the Cleveland Indians statistician who follows James formula. He catches the eye of Beane and is hired by Oakland as assistant GM. The biggest item that is looked at with each player is on base percentage. If the player can get on base, they will have a good chance of scoring. It doesn’ t matter how the player gets on base, hit, walk, hit by pitch, they are on first base and that’s all they need. During a meeting with the scouts, Beane tells the scouts to look at the OBP in the 300 range for players to bring in. When you can’t just go out and buy the best player out there, you need to look at other options in finding players and Beane and DePoesta did just that, they needed a first baseman and they went to Scott Hatteberg, a catcher who could not throw the ball, Beane had him learn first base, a move that extended the career of Hatteberg. Taking pitches was another pillar in the money ball philosophy, wear out the opposing pitcher, take pitches, foul off pitches and swing at your pitch. Taking a walk is always better than making a non- productive out. That philosophy was successful for the A’s, making the playoffs during the 2002 season and winning just as many games as the New York Yankees who had three times the budget of the A’s. The movie is fantastic, the acting is excellent, especially the performance of Chris Pratt as Hatteberg. For those of you who know Pratt as the goof ball Andy on the TV show “Parks & Recreation” you can really see how great of an actor Pratt is. Some elements of the movie had to be dramatized for effect. For instance, A’s skipper Art Howe is portrayed as a stubborn mule who refuses to accept the philosophy Beane is teaching. It was shown in the movie that Beane was so upset that Howe would not play Hatteberg at first that he traded away Carlos Pena in order to force Howe to start Hatteberg. There is also a scene showing that A’s players had to pay for their own soda in the clubhouse, which was not true but is just adds to the effect that the A’s are struggling for money and were looking for any ways they could find to pump more money into the team. It also lead to a good joke in the movie when Beane calls the Tigers GM to trade for Pena, Beane says that part of the deal will be that the Tigers pay for three years worth of soda for the A’s. There is also a very glaring error at the end of the movie, it’s the 2002 ALDS, the A’s and Twins have played to force a fifth game, the setting in the movie is a night game, it was really a Sunday afternoon game. But there is an even bigger error in the recreation of game five. In the movie it is shown that Ray Durham flies out to third base and the ball is caught by Corey Koskie. How it really happened was Durham fouled out to short right field and the final out was caught by Denny Hocking, who was playing second base. I know it is really only an error that Twins and A’s fans remember or care about, but this movie is base on a true story, it would be nice if they would have taken the effort to get the things that actually happened accurate. It’s not like it was hundreds of years ago where information on what happened would be scarce at best, this was not even a decade ago when filming began and there are plenty of resources available to find the final out. Another thing that disappointed me about “Moneyball” was the fact that the A’s big three (Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and Barry Zito) had little to no acknowledgement. The big three were the foundation of the A’s success, but if you watch the movie, you wouldn’t even know the A’s had starting pitchers. The movie really gives viewers an inside look as to how your favorite baseball team is built and all the intangibles it takes to build a winning ball club with a small budget. The money ball philosophy has now been accepted by most if not all major league baseball teams as another factor to look at when drafting or signing new players. |
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