I just watched Moneyball recently. I’ve known the story for a while and it’s the go-to shorthand for ignoring flashy spectacle assets in exchange for 5% here and 8% there adding up to a stronger result in aggregate, but I never saw the movie. And the movie is honestly kind of depressing with some of the artistic choices they made.
See, the movie is the story of how a statistics nerd is way better at assembling baseball teams than any of the old men in the decision-making seats because they make decisions based on shallow metrics like healthy aesthetics and flashy spectacle plays like home runs. They’re really just ascended baseball fans with no sense of professionalism or capacity for real analysis but a hubris born from the fact that the people currently in charge are also in charge of picking their successors, and they pick other baseball fans (including retired baseball players) to replace them, which means statistics nerds who look at the result over the aesthetics don’t get to play and prove how much better they are. But things turn around for the statistics nerd when an aggro dipshit with nice hair takes up the cause of statistics-based baseball because said aggro dipshit is desperate for an advantage that can bring his horribly underfunded team up to par. This is not a terrible story, except that the aggro dipshit is the main character.
That would be fine if that was the real story of the Oakland Athletics’ 2002 season, and the fact is that the statistics nerd is a fresh college grad who more-or-less had his shit together while Oakland Athletics’ manager Billy Beane had stumbled through a series of false victories into a death spiral and really needed something to turn around for him, so even if Billy Beane’s greatest asset is his hair he’s still the better character because sometimes that’s how real life is.
But that isn’t how real life was! The actual real Billy Beane is not an aggro dipshit with nice hair whose only smart move was finding someone smarter than him to take orders from under the disguise of hiring on an advisor. The statistics nerd from the movie is a complete fabrication. Not a conglomerate character, but made from scratch. The closest thing to the statistics nerd in real life was Sandy Alderson, the manager prior to Beane. The Oakland Athletics came under new ownership during Alderson’s tenure and the funding for players was cut from the highest in the league to the lowest, with predictably disastrous consequences for their wins, so Alderson started using the statistical methods of Moneyball to create an aggressively cost-effective team. Billy Beane learned that method while working as assistant manager and, evidently, got way better at it than Alderson was after he took over in the late 90s, leading up to the poorest team in the league reaching the playoffs four years in a row in the early-to-mid 00s. Moneyball was published as non-fiction in 2003 about how the Athletics pulled off their 2002 upsets, and other teams’ managers adapted to the strategy over the course of the next couple of years, which is why the Athletics’ performance fell off after a couple of years.
You can even hear traces of this true story in some of the montage audio which is, I believe, a direct quote or even actual audio of baseball commentary of the season. They talk about how Billy Beane built the team off the theories of a book that he read, not a nerd who he met in person and took orders from while barking loudly enough to preserve the delusion of being in control.
Billy Beane wasn’t a front man lending good looks and “confidence” to a helpless but brilliant nerd, he did the analysis himself. Hollywood evidently decided this story would be better if Billy Beane was at-best mediocre at his actual job of managing baseball teams and had to find someone much better at it to do the job for him, and also that the more competent person had to be a nerd reluctant to advocate for themselves who had to be bullied into taking their shot at greatness (through Beane) so that the protagonist can retain a veneer of being in charge. The Moneyball protagonist version of Billy Beane isn’t even a particularly good negotiator or charming or anything, his only “social skill” is a willingness to be a jackass, and while that isn’t nothing, it’s the same mediocre-at-best level of competence as he demonstrates as a manager.
The movie makes a lot of smart artistic choices with the true story. Cutting Alderman to compress the 5-ish year process of developing Moneyball into a single revolutionary season where drastic action was taken in response to a devastating gutting of the team helps to make the Moneyball story more dramatic even when told from the people who were closest to it, when in reality, if you’re close to the process, by the time it’s paying out huge dividends it usually does so after many smaller victories which makes the big wins seem like a matter of grinding inevitability. There’s a throughline in the movie about how Beane signed up for professional baseball because the Mets were impressed with a bunch of attributes that turned out to not mean fucking anything to the actual winning of the game, passing on a scholarship to Stanford to do so, and movie!Beane hires the statistics nerd because the statistics nerd accurately assesses that he might have had the appearance of being “the complete package” but his stats showed someone who was mediocre at everything that mattered.
But apparently it was also super important to this story that the protagonist had to be a moron cheating off of someone else’s homework.
Chamomile Has A Blog 