The Moneyball Movie Was Pretty Good. Let Me Tell You Why I Hated It.

The movie begins with the A’s losing in the American League Divisional Series. The movie leaves out this detail, but it was their second consecutive trip to the playoffs. As soon as the A’s were eliminated, star players Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, and Jason Isringhausen all left the team via free agency. A’s GM Billy Beane was now faced with the prospect of having to replace all those great players despite his ownership continuing to provide him with one of the lowest payrolls in baseball. In the movie, Beane’s first signing in the offseason was Jeremy Giambi. In real life, Giambi had already been with the team for two years. But hey, who’s counting?

Beane then discovers Jonah Hill, who is supposed to be the real-life Paul DePodesta, but in the movie is named Peter Brand. (Slate does a wonderful breakdown of the myth behind Moneyball). Beane is so impressed with Brand’s ability to understand On-Base Percentage that he buys him from the Indians. I wasn’t aware you could buy and sell front office employees, but maybe I’m wrong. Also, in actuality, DePodesta came to the A’s in 1999 and Oakland was in the playoffs the next season. Little details like this in a baseball movie that’s supposed to be non-fiction are enough to drive a fan crazy.

Anyway, Beane and Brand shake up the A’s organization with their newfangled statistics and piss off everybody in the process. This leads to plenty of genuinely funny scenes. Unfortunately, they were inter-cut with montages of the A’s radio play-by-play guy (every sports movie needs a radio play-by-play guy), as well as Brad Pitt working out and drive around in a dirt field in his bit truck and it was all very boring and pointless and stupid and I hated every second of the montage. Seriously, there were 15 minutes of Brad Pitt working out throughout the film, and the movie told me nothing about why he felt compelled to constantly driving his truck around out by the power lines where we last saw Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box. Also, in real life, Billy Beane was a 5-tool player who washed out of the big leagues. The movie made sure to tell us this, but failed to explain why it mattered. Maybe they wanted to show how Billy Beane is so…nope, I’ve got nothing.

The climax of the film is the 20th consecutive victory towards the end of the regular season. The game of course ends with Scott Hatteberg’s dramatic pinch-hit home run. In the movie, it’s played like A’s manager Art Howe finally gave Hatteberg his big chance and Hatteberg came through and proved that advanced metrics pwn the eyeball test, so suck it old fuddy-duddy baseball knowledge! The nerds are here to stay! Now Howe will come around and believe in what they are doing in Oakland. The perfect movie moment. Did it matter that in reality, Hatteberg had nearly 500 at-bats that season for Howe? The only thing more confusing than Hatteberg getting a day off in real life when a 20-game winning streak was on the line is why we should be surprised that the starting first basemen with the .807 OPS is a logical choice to pinch-hit in a tie game in extra innings.

Now that the A’s had changed baseball forever we could celebrate. Hooray! The A’s made the playoffs for the third straight year! And they lost in the ALDS. For the third straight year. In the movie, this got Beane an interview with the Boston Red Sox. He turned down a $12 million dollar contract. Before the credits roll, we get the little updates on the story of Moneyball. It was something along these lines:

“The Red Sox would win the World Series in 2004. They used the same system that Billy Beane had discovered in Oakland.”

And it’s true. The Sox won the World Series in 2004 using nothing but an advanced understanding of statistics and a one-hundred and fifty-fucking-million dollar payroll! That’s pretty much the same thing Billy Beane was doing in Oakland while the A’s went to the playoffs for four consecutive seasons for a quarter of that money. And the movie doesn’t even mention the A’s string of successful seasons under Beane. I suppose it’s easier to say that the Red Sox won A World Series as opposed to saying the A’s had 8 consecutive winning seasons. Because who would want where the hero doesn’t win the big game?

Now I know a lot of my problems with this movie have to do with the fictionalized movie version of the story. But sitting there I kept thinking “When will this end!?” By the time Beane’s precocious daughter was playing him a song for the final 4 minutes of the film, I was beside myself.

The parts where Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill and Phillip Seymour Hoffman were speaking were great. The movie is full of funny parts and good acting. So go see it. You’ll probably enjoy it. It’s a 7.9 on IMDB and tracking at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. Numbers don’t lie, right?

Not me. I use a different metric to determine how good a movie is. I use the eyeball test, and my eyeballs were tired of this movie. They were tired of Brad Pitt pumping iron and driving around in an Oakland dirt field. Now get off my lawn.