Ever since its invention in the mid-19th century, people have seen baseball as a metaphor for American life. Writers and filmmakers from John Updike to Ken Burns have used the sport to comment on everything from race and class to heroism and small town values. Lately though, baseball’s unique luster has begun to wear off. The yearly poaching of the best players by rich teams from poor teams, the plodding pace of the games, and the scandals of the steroid era have alienated fans and tarnished some of the game’s luster. The stadiums are full and the money is still flowing, but baseball no longer has the sacred cultural status that it once did.
Yet the new film Moneyball, directed by Bennett Miller, proves that our erstwhile national pastime still has some juice left both as a form of entertainment and as a metaphor. In addition to being an exciting underdog story and a compelling character study of Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the movie also draws attention to an important trend: Americans’ growing love affair with statistics. Moneyball is a baseball movie for the information age.
The film begins following the A’s loss to the New York Yankees in the 2001 Major League playoffs. Reeling from the loss and from the departure of his best players in free agency, Beane decides to take a radical new approach to player acquisition, one based on empirical readouts as opposed to subjective criteria such as looks and potential. To the dismay of the team’s aging talent scouts, he starts spending hours with a dumpy-looking young nerd named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), sifting through charts and numbers like a miner panning for gold. Despite being mocked by baseball’s establishment and his own employees, Beane’s stats-based approach ultimately turns the A’s into a winner.
Like last year’s The Social Network (which was also written by Aaron Sorkin, who receives a co-writer credit on Moneyball), Moneyball makes looking at computer screens feel tense and exciting. Brand, played with brilliant schlubbiness by Hill, is the next in a long line of Hollywood nerd-heroes. Even as he rises to the top of the A’s organization, Brand retains a boyish delight—and disbelief—that Beane will actually listen to him.
Hill delivers as Brand, but it is Pitt who carries the film. With the camera glued to him almost at all times, he delivers a fantastic performance as the neurotic, chair-throwing Beane, a former jock who is so competitive that he cannot watch the A’s games either in person or on television.The role showcases Pitt’s comedic chops while hinting at the deep anguish felt by a man who, despite having all the talent and brains in the world, has always come up just a little bit short. By allowing Beane’s pain to bubble just below the surface, Pitt carries the film through some of the plot’s less interesting moments.
Moneyball’s only major flaw is that it contributes to the over-romanticization of statistics that has characterized our society in recent years. During the past decade our culture has become increasingly enamored with data-driven analysis applied to a broad range of fields. From Freakonomics to Blink to Robert Wright’s recent effort The Evolution of God, the bestseller lists are perennially filled with books promising to systematize new aspects of our lives such as social behavior and religion.
While numbers can be incredibly helpful in certain situations, America’s Moneyball moment has led to an over-reliance on data in much of our society. The self-styled “reform” movement in public education, for instance, introduced a new brand of statistical analysis to our schools, using testing-based standards to assess students and teachers alike. While these educators mean well, their conformist approach has undermined the creativity and flexibility that are the core strengths of our educational system. The hallmarks of a great education, like most important aspects of life, are things that cannot be measured.
Now the trend has made it to Hollywood. Like The Social Network and A Beautiful Mind before it, Moneyball illustrates how information has itself become a powerful narrative, a selling point for products and films and political organizations. Like any story, this one can be misleading if taken to an extreme. Ironically, the one group of viewers who may not like Moneyball are hardcore baseball fans, who could be turned off by the film’s reductive interpretation of Beane’s strategy and his success.
It is fitting, then, that the best aspects of the film are its human elements: Beane’s violent mood swings, Hill’s convincing performance as the timid but brilliant statistician, the glimpses that we catch of the player’s private lives. It is the people behind the statistics who make Moneyball come alive. The filmmakers seem to realize that while numbers can be exciting, nothing is as powerful as a great story.
