BEFORE: Up in New England, hanging out with my BFF Andy. He and I drove to the Newport Chowder Cook-off, an annual tradition for us, then afterwards we relaxed with some beers and watched the sports. Cause that's what guys do together, right? OK, so it was a movie about sports, that still counts. I did read the book this film was based on, plus I've heard good things...
It's an easy link from Robert De Niro through "Sleepers" to Brad Pitt (last heard in "Megamind").
THE PLOT: Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane's attempts to put together a baseball club on a budget by employing computer-generated analysis to acquire new players.
AFTER: They faced an uphill battle, turning a factual book about baseball statistics and analysis into a compelling narrative. For a while, it seemed like this film was going to be a retread of "Major League", since there is an attempt to assemble a bunch of has-beens, coulda-beens and never-weres into a coherent team, and to have that team win against all conventional wisdom.
But really, the film documents a sea change in the way that baseball was played, or at least managed. What you had in baseball was a decades-old system, where a bunch of senior scouts recruited strong players based on their eyewitness accounts, relying on their gut instincts about which players had the winning spirit, or at least the winning look. Even in the late 1990's, this system prevailed over computer analysis and mathematical projections. One team, with the right stats guy, turned the system on its head and found a bunch of players that were undervalued by the other teams.
This eventually worked out for the Oakland A's, once the general manager was finally able to work around their reluctant manager, who persisted in playing according to tired rules, like automatically bringing in a right-handed pitcher to face a strong left-handed batter. Here's the problem - back in the day, stats-friendly managers like Earl Weaver determined that righties did have a slightly better pitching record against lefty batter, so when a strong left-handed batter came up, and he had a choice between two relief pitchers, he'd choose a righty. Now, if you do that too many times, you start to skew the results, and the ERAs going forward do not reflect a genuine righty-vs.-lefty account. It becomes a habit, and a stats-driven self-fulfilling prophecy - and before long, every other manager is doing it too, and expecting to improve their pitchers' averages.
What Billy Beane did with his "Billyball" (named after statistician Bill James, not himself) worked for the A's primarily because no other team was doing it - adding up the runs on paper and picking players based on simple stats like walks, because walks get people on base, and if you improve your on-base percentage, you (theoretically) increase your team's runs. But if all the other teams were to adopt the same concepts and seek out those same players, the strategy would have lost its effectiveness.
Usually, I'm against a film jumping around in time to tell a story, but here is one of the rare cases where that technique works. The story of the Oakland A's in 2002 is intertwined with the history of Billy Beane as a promising but under-performing baseball player. The lessons he learned as a player have a direct effect on how he manages the team, so it makes sense to cut to flashbacks, as we try to get inside his head.
Brad Pitt plays Beane as a tortured soul who feels every loss, even if his players don't, and a losing season is like a knife in his gut. Of course, no one can predict the future, so when he's offered a chance to work for a big-budget team, he's torn once again - should he take the big-money offer while he can, or turn it down and hold fast to his principles?
Baseball here is a metaphor for life - is it better to be a big fish in a small pond, or a small fish in a big pond? I often equate my work in independent animation with minor-league baseball. I feel like I'm playing a good game, but I know there are bigger companies I could be working for - I just don't know if I've got what it takes to do so. So I felt Billy Bean's struggle.
The film is actually a little short on game footage, which is a minor drawback, but it supplies enough drama between the GM, manager, and players to compensate. (The scenes between Beane and his daughter were also a mix of heart-warming and heart-breaking) The gameplay mainly centers on the winning streak that the A's did have in 2002, and depicts the glorious feeling of hitting the game-winning run. I'm going to be trying for that same feeling tomorrow, as I participate in a 10-hour trivia marathon.
Also starring Jonah Hill (also last heard in "Megamind"), Philip Seymour Hoffman (last seen in "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead"), Robin Wright (last seen in "New York, I Love You"), Chris Pratt, Stephen Bishop, with cameos from Jack McGee, Arliss Howard, and Joe Satriani.
RATING: 7 out of 10 line-up cards
EDIT: Forgot to mention the Red Sox connection - a couple years after the events depicted in this film, the Sox decided to follow similar "Billyball" tactics, and you could say that, when combined with their larger payroll, this resulted in their World Series victory in 2004, their first since 1918. So, while on one level this is a story of the success of the Oakland A's in 2002, I view it as a precursor to the breaking of the Curse of the Bambino. Movies are mirrors sometimes, and we see what we want.
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