This 2011 Brad Pitt Sports Movie Changed the Way We Think About Baseball
Moneyball is one of the all-time great baseball movies because of what sets it apart.
Baseball season is underway, and that means that when the games aren't on, fans of America's pastime will be looking to baseball movies for a dramatized, stylized, and emotionally satisfying rendering of the sport.
There are a lot of options when it comes to great baseball movies, from longtime classics like The Natural and Pride of the Yankees, to family comedies like The Sandlot, to emotional fantasies like Field of Dreams. These are all films that filter their emotional potency through the game of baseball, and find a rich heart in its rules, rituals, and innate drama. Then there's Moneyball (streaming now on Peacock).
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Released in 2011, and based on the true story of the Oakland Athletics and their maverick General Manager Billy Beane, Moneyball has all of the ingredients you need for a great baseball movie. It's got a cast of likable stars (including all-star Brad Pitt), an underdog team fighting for attention in a crowded league, and moments of triumph on the diamond. But it's also one of those movies that digs deeper into what baseball means to us, how the sport works, and what it takes to win in a league where money is often the defining factor. Watch it casually, and it's a tremendously entertaining sports drama. Watch it a little more closely, and it just might change the way you think about baseball.
Why Moneyball is a different kind of baseball movie
At one point in director Bennett Miller's Moneyball, Billy Beane (Pitt) says, "It's hard not to be romantic about baseball." At another, he asks the question: "How can you not be romantic about baseball?" This repeated thematic refrain is key to Moneyball's success in establishing dramatic tension, because from the outside looking in, the way the story works is decidedly, deliberately unromantic.
As the film picks up, the Oakland A's are struggling. They've got a limited budget, stars departing for richer teams, and very little in the way of major new prospects — in part because there just isn't money to spend. Beane, a former player who was a top prospect but couldn't quite hack it in the majors, is doing his best to keep things afloat when he meets Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a data expert who backs up Beane's long-held suspicions that the old method of relying on scouts to spot top players isn't working anymore.
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Instead, Beane and Brand embark on a more data-driven approach, using stats to determine which players, regardless of star power or rating among scouts, are able to get on base and, thus, move the team into scoring position to win games. Using this as a key metric, they start picking up overlooked, aging, and even previously injured players on the cheap, much to the chagrin of the scouting crew and the A's on-field manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman). It's an approach that flies in the face of everything the old heads know about baseball, and pushes back against the romance of the star player in a clutch position, scoring the game-winning run or getting that final out through sheer force of talent.
This tension between the classic, player-driven form of the game and Beane's new data-based mindset makes up the bulk of Moneyball's story, particularly as the A's start winning and everyone around Beane and Brand must start to lend credence to what they're doing. If you can win with data, maybe the old, more romantic view of the game really is dying out, and if that's the true, what does baseball look like when it's gone?
These are the questions that Moneyball starts to ask, interspersed with the personal stories of the ragtag team and Beane himself, who's doing his best to carve out a place for himself in a game he once loved while also trying to bond more closely with his daughter (Kerris Dorsey). Along the way, Beane muses about the romance of baseball, even while pushing back against the sport because it didn't get him anywhere as a player. He even avoids watching A's game from the ballpark itself, choosing instead to simply listen to the game from the team gym. It all points to someone who's pushing the feeling of the game away in favor of something more cerebral.
But the film's script, adapted by Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian from Michael Lewis' 2003 book, is smarter than that, and the more Billy tries to push baseball away, the more he realizes he loves it. He just loves it in new ways, especially as the team's momentum builds and it becomes clear that they're onto something. Moneyball sounds like it's going to be a film about the dangers of getting emotionally wrapped up in something, but instead becomes a film about how the emotion was the point all along. It's not about data or hidden tricks to winning or algorithms. It's about finding the best way through, and learning to care again. So many baseball films are about the tension between love of the game and love of life outside of the game. In Moneyball, the tension is about the love of the game and the ways the game can hurt you despite that love. In the end, though, it's worth it, as lovers of baseball always know it will be.
Moneyball is now streaming on Peacock.
