RSS Feed Menu
Since I’m the co-author of a recent book critical of the book Moneyball, folks have been asking what I think about the new movie based on the book. The answer may surprise them: I liked it. What’s not to like? Brad Pitt brilliantly plays the hero in an entertaining melodrama in which the good guys best the bogeyman.
The bogeyman is the benighted baseball establishment. The good guys are Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane and his geeky sidekick, who recognize that the game can be revolutionized by advanced statistics. According to the film, which is reasonably faithful to the Michael Lewis book, the A’s achieved great success on a shoestring budget thanks to Beane’s revolutionary ideas that the establishment reflexively dismissed.
Great story, well acted, and I won’t be upset if the movie garners awards. I will be upset, though, if anyone thinks that the story line bears much relationship to actual events. It’s fitting that Michael Lewis’s book went Hollywood: it tells a gripping story rooted more in a writer’s fertile imagination than in reality.
As an explanation for the A’s success, Moneyball fails to survive scrutiny. For one thing, no special explanation is needed. Through conventional means, low-budget teams sometimes acquire enough quality players to succeed. During the 2002 season chronicled by Moneyball, the A’s featured three dominant starting pitchers. Advanced statistics had nothing to do with Beane’s acquisition of these stars, so what did Michael Lewis do? He treated the team’s crown jewels as an afterthought, while dwelling on two relatively inconsequential middle relief pitchers. So too, Lewis barely mentioned three sluggers (including the league’s Most Valuable Player) who combined for more than 90 home runs. They contributed mightily to Oakland’s success, but didn’t fit the book’s strained explanation for that success.
Low-budget teams are at a disadvantage. While some do well in any given season, and a few thrive for several years at a clip, teams with shallow pockets generally struggle to sustain success over the long haul. (One exception, the Minnesota Twins, has succeeded for the better part of two decades while explicitly disavowing the tactics trumpeted by Moneyball.) But Moneyball suggested that Billy Beane could overcome the obstacles and sustain Oakland’s success because of his utilization of advanced statistics. As it happens, even as Hollywood celebrates Beane, his A’s just completed their fifth consecutive mediocre (or worse) season.
Why? In part because the major insights attributed to Beane by Moneyball turned out to be bogus. Much of the book covers the 2002 draft, suggesting that Beane drafted brilliantly because of his unconventional ideas. He eschewed high school players in favor of college players, and assessed college players based wholly on statistics, especially on-base percentage (OBP), without the traditional reliance on scouts.
Michael Lewis focuses analysis of Beane’s drafting acumen on two college players: Jeremy Brown and Brant Colamarino. Both were slow, misshapen, and panned by scouts, but had great OBPs; Beane craved them. Neither player made it. (Brown retired after ten at-bats with Oakland. Colamarino never rose higher than Double A.) Indeed, of the 400 players Beane selected in his first ten drafts, roughly 5% had any impact.
All told, there is zero evidence to support one of Moneyball’s pillars: Beane’s unique ability to identify and draft undervalued prospective stars. Indeed, Beane’s weak track record drafting players clearly contributed to the team’s disastrous performance in 2011. Many low-budget teams fared better – not just this year but over the past several years.
In Lewis’s telling, the A’s use of advanced statistics also produced superior game management. The team adhered to a key tenet of the advanced statistics crowd: outs are too precious to give up with sacrifice bunts or to risk with aggressive base-running. There are various problems with this overly tidy analysis, and both pre- and post-Moneyball many teams thrived by ignoring the admonition against risky base-running. Beane himself came to see the light – his A’s have become an aggressive base-running team.
Asked about the change in tactics, Beane cites the intangible effects that mathematical formulae cannot capture. His teams take chances on the bases because of the cascading benefits of what Beane calls the “mentality of aggressiveness.” Beane deserves credit for changing course, but that doesn’t change the fact that another key insight attributed to him by Moneyball did not stand the test of time.
Anyone interested in an entertaining tale should go see Moneyball the movie. Anyone interested in a book that (in the words of former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent) “takes apart the Moneyball myths” and offers an alternative vision of baseball, should check out Shorthopsbaseballbook.com.
Alan,
I have also found it irritating when Hollywood takes a story I know well and turns it into, well, a near miss or a whopping miss as compared to a book. I resolved my irritation by trying to turn a real life story into a screenplay. Try it. You’ll get a greater appreciation, perhaps, of why the story in the book is not the one you see on the screen.
I think the most telling comment I’ve heard about Moneyball is that it’s pretty hard to believe that the book could be made into a film. I haven’t seen the movie (and won’t get to until it has closed captions) nor read all of the book (I have read some passages). I just hope it’s not a film that cheapens reality like “A League Of Their Own” did with women’s baseball. I believe we can all rest assured that Hollywood’s main interest is to tell an, at least, plausible story that will make money. While my understanding is that Moneyball – the book – has plenty to stimulate the brain, the problem of getting that onto film is that much of what is so great about a book is what happens in a person’s head that cannot be made visible in a film.
Hollywood has thousands of movies that were box office successes that simply could not possibly measure up to the book that preceded the film. I watched one last night – Les Miserables – an interesting movie that completely guts the internal drama of a masterpiece of fiction. I understand why. It’s for the same reason we’ve never seen the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “A Confederacy Of Dunces” on the screen: because it’s virtually impossible to translate what’s going on inside the heads of main characters onto film.
I’m guessing your article isn’t from the point of view of a film critic but rather that of a sports critic or fan of considerable knowledge. I don’t know how you could reconcile the difference between points of view, unless you’re Roger Ebert and a maniac Cubs fan.
Whatever, I enjoyed reading your perspective. I wrote about college and amateur softball for about 20 years and I feel your pain.
I’m sure Maxine Waters wouldn’t be brought in here to give her opinion on conservatism, so what is one of the Hirsches doing here talking about sabermetrics? Anthony Weiner is more dignified.
Me and my family never pay to see a typical Hollywood movie anymore. Too liberal. Usually some political message or social engineering from the left.
We really miss Charlton Heston and John Wayne.
It shows.
(Should be “My family and I…”)
Actually, there are papers in statistical and economic journals that support the moneyball hypothesis…namely, that OBP is a better predictor of winning percentage than is slugging. Check out the paper called “An economic evaluation of the Moneyball hypothesis” in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
So, please make sure your critique of the book and/or movie doesn’t fall victim to the same issues as Moneyball itself (oversimplifying the evidence to support your thesis).
As a recent post on my fledgling blog at sjcrown.com suggests, there’s a 2011 team that at least lends some credence to the precepts expounded in Moneyball. It so happens the St. Louis Cardinals led the National League in on base percentage this year. Yes, it took a full scale collapse by the Atlanta Braves for the Redbirds to sneak into the playoffs, but the high on base percentage allowed the Cardinals to overcome hitting into more double plays than anyone in the league. Not only that, but their pitchers dished out twenty-six blown saves, more than anyone except Washington. If the Cardinals had avoided ten or so of those blown saves, they probably would have won their division.
And with Tony Larussa as manager, Dave Duncan as pitching coach, and Mark McGwire as hitting coach, there’s another interesting Oakland-St. Louis connection, although I don’t know if Mr. Beane had much to do with these guys.
Now, I’m not really out to reduce baseball to statistics. If sports become that predictable, we’ll all stop caring about them. Still, I find the juxtaposition of the theatrical release of Moneyball and the playoff run of the Cardinals interesting.
The biggest indictment of Moneyball is that it fails to achieve the only thing that matters…winning a championship.
Because the Boston Red Sox didn’t win a championship using said principals under Theo Epstein?
Brilliant?
Pitt?
I guess if there is a Best Non-Actor Award.
Pitt’s rep is purely a publicist’s creation, and nothing else, an exploitation of his looks, his girlfriend, and Mr. Studly persona. And the slavering of some male critics who have a lust for him.
Even Esterhaz has a love affair with Pitt saying he idolizes him acting in anything. This isn’t admiration it’s plumbing the dark depths of his sexual fantasies.
Pitt is a movie star, not an actor. For him to win Best Actor would be a disputation of the merits of the award, and an indication that the Academy is smitten with him, not his theatrics, which are flat, unencumbered by talent. That he had tight control of the book/ movie production rights, does not speak well to the agents in the business who could have cast a hundred different, genuine actors in the role, and come away with a better performance. Pitt could have hired a genuine actor to portray Beane. And Philip Seymour Hoffman comes immediately to mind instead of the sourpuss he played instead.
Worship him if you must, but puh-leeeze, hold the superlatives for your dreams.
» Die Kunst zu gewinnen — Moneyball - Historienschinken - // Feb 14, 2012 at 11:20 am
[...] mutig, aber es hat sich gelohnt: Selbst die baseballverücktesten Besserwisser lieben den [...]