I don’t know if Aaron
Sorkin is a baseball fan. His TV characters definitely are. Anyone who watched
the second episode of Sports Night remembers Jeremy delivering a
highlight of baseball game that is eight minutes long, enthusing about how a
batter standing in the box for fifteen seconds is essential and shouting “That’s
a travesty!” when its cut to only the bare minimum. In another episode Dan is
enthusing about doing a story on ‘The Shot Heard Round the World’ and wants to
grill Isaac, who was in the Polo Grounds covering the game that day – and is
stunned when Isaac tells him he’d missed the home run because Ralph Branca warmed
up too quickly.
Sports isn’t nearly as
essential to The West Wing as it is on Sports Night but every so
often the characters will mention a team they follow. Toby Ziegler, who grew up
in Brooklyn, roots for the Yankees, and takes no small relish in blaming Bartlet’s
opponent for being ‘responsible’ for the Yankees defeat when he goes to a ball
game. Amy Gardener (Mary Louise-Parker) tells a candidate she’s managing that
it will take Josh a little longer than Donna to figure out his political
strategy because ‘the Mets lost last night.’ We then cut to Josh dwelling over
that defeat…and two minutes later, he figures out what the strategy is.
So clearly Sorkin has
respect for the game even if he doesn’t himself love it as unabashedly as some
of his characters do. That is no doubt part of the reason he wrote the
screenplay for Moneyball based on
the best selling novel by Michael Lewis. Just as with The Social Network the
previous year, Sorkin took a story that many could never see being turned into
a film and made another critically acclaimed, box office hit that ended up
nominated for Best Picture and earned him his second consecutive Oscar nomination
for Best Adapted Screenplay. Given the events of this past week, it is also a
far more relevant movie than you’d think – and in a way, a prescient one.
Moneyball is a baseball movie unlike
any that had been made before and I don’t just mean the fact that it is set
primarily in the front office, barely involves any actual baseball and doesn’t
end with a climatic victory. It is tonally one of the most melancholy sports
movies ever made. This was almost certainly by design: the casual sports fan
knew that Billy Beane, the character at the center of the film, was the front
office man for the Oakland A’s, which to that point had not won the World Series
since 1989 (and they still haven’t). Nor was this story of the triumph of a great
player or a great team, but of a new way of playing the game, one that was extremely
controversial and is still not much admired by true fans. I have sometimes
wondered whether Sorkin wrote Moneyball not so much out of wanting to tell
the story but as a kind of dirge for the man at the center of it.
The quote that Billy Beane
says at the beginning of the movie has gone down in film history as he
describes Oakland’s prospects after the 2001 season: “There are rich teams and
there are poor teams. Then there’s fifty feet of crap. And then there’s us.”
Billy is telling the truth
about Oakland’s prospects but he’s not being entirely honest about why this is
the case, and neither is Sorkin. Ever since Charles Finley moved the A’s to
Oakland from Kansas City in 1967, the A’s have been one of the most successful
teams in the postseason and one of the poorest at the gate. During their first
great dynasty from 1971-1975, where they became the only non-Yankee team to win
three consecutive World Series, they could not draw more than a million fans a
season. Finley was also one of the game cheapest owners and treated his players
abominably. Because of his reneging on the contract of his best pitcher Catfish
Hunter, Hunter became the first ever free agent and signed with the Yankees before
the 1975 season. When the reserve clause ended up being killed the next winter,
it was the beginning of the end of the A’s dynasty and they finished dead last
in 1977.
It did not help that Oakland
has never truly been a baseball town. During their second great dynasty between
1988-1992, one of the major factors in their doing well was the fact that the
Raiders, who had been in Oakland during the 1970s, had relocated to Los
Angeles. After the A’s began to decline in the late 1990s, attendance dwindled
and despite everything that Beane tried in Oakland it has never recovered. It’s
not really a shock that the team has announced this past week that they are
relocated to Las Vegas in three years; since at least 1999 there was constant speculation
that the low attendance would force them to leave Oakland, with Sacramento or
San Jose as the likely contenders. Those fans who will mourn the departure of
the A’s really haven’t been noticing how empty the stands have been.
Beane’s decision to stop
trying to pay the mounting costs of free agency and find a new way to win was built
out of desperation. It does not, however, make what he and Moneyball did either
unique or even particularly admirable. Ever since the National League was
established in 1876, there has always been a divide between how fans view baseball
and everyone connected to ownership do. (I’ve even written my own series about
the economic history). Fans view it as a game when it is in fact a business.
The owners view the players fans idolize as employees and like all business
owners are about the bottom line first and everything else second. They spent a
century treated players like slaves so they wouldn’t have to pay them what they
were worth, and the moment they were given freedom they continued the war on
them they had in the press for over a century that they are spoiled and
overpaid. The fans have always been willing to go along with this.
Every major move ownership
has ever done – destroying minor league independence so they run and control
their own players on the minors, the integration of the sport, fighting the
idea of the union, engaging in constant labor struggles, lockdowns, strikes,
even going so far as to engage in collusion to break free agency – is all about
maximizing profits first. Given what I have recently learned about just how
rich even the smallest of small market teams are, part of me honestly wonders
whether the desire of those teams not to pay big money on free agents is less
about not having the money and more about maximizing their own bottom line even
if it is at the expense of their product. Nor is that the only way they will
turn a blind eye to help their box office. Moneyball never directly remarks
on the presence of steroids that was going to become front page news within a
few years of the events in the film, but one of the players who becomes a free
agent is Jason Giambi, one of the most notorious users of steroids in the game.
Ownership knew steroid use was rampant during this period, and not only turned
a blind eye but stomped on those who tried to expose it.
I have little doubt that
is why the major figure in Moneyball is Billy Beane. Beane was a major
league prospect with the Mets and spent years in the game, eventually getting
what they call a ‘cup of coffee in the bigs and spending most of his career in
the minor leagues. Beane became a scout in April of 1990 and eventually became
general manager in 1997. Much of what we see in the film is fictionalized –
Beane had been following the approach of Sandy Alderson, the former GM to focus
on sabermetric principles, and it was fundamentally done on orders of ownership
to slash payroll. Beane is considered a hero among owners, not because he got
his team to the world series but because the A’s were one of the most
cost-effective teams in baseball. That’s not the kind of thing that leads to a
stirring sports movie. Nor does the fact that despite this brilliant fact of
leadership, Billy Beane never led the A’s to the World Series, something that
more than a few managers and GMs have criticized his approach for.
Sorkin’s answer to this is
to this best to make the movie ‘traditional’ by framing the concept at the end
of the 2001 season as a man whose advice is being questioned by his scouts and
leadership. He then has the idea foisted on him by a fictionalized version of
all the people helped him ‘Peter Brand’, who is played by Jonah Hill. Beane
plays it as someone who is reluctant to go along with the idea but whose
experience as a player (which we see in flashbacks) show him still wanting to
win ‘the last game of a season.’ In this
sense, Sorkin adheres to the traditional style of baseball movie by making
Beane a player who wants his team to win. If he showed Beane as a GM being
driven by spending as little money as possible, this movie truly would have
been unwatchable.
It helps, of course, that
Beane is played by Brad Pitt. Around this time in his career Pitt, like many heartthrobs
of the 1990s and early 2000s, was starting to get older and wanted to turn his
career into different roles. It’s worth noting that many of Pitt’s roles starting
out were stretches of his acting muscles, movies such as Twelve Monkeys and
A River Runs Through It were superb example of Pitt’s early potential
before he spent a decade being more famous for the women he was attached to (Gwyneth
Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston, Angelina Jolie) then the quality of his films.
Starting with his work in the underseen classic The Assassination of Jesse
James By the Coward Robert Ford, Pitt would begin to put together an
impressive role of credits for the next decade, much like his fellow Oceans
Eleven pack, Matt Damon and George Clooney. (Like Pitt, Clooney received an
Academy Award nomination this same year for The Descendants; both would
have been notably superior choices to the eventual winner Jean Dujardin for The
Artist.)
Because, like professional
athletes, there is an unspoken expiration date of an actor’s marketability,
Pitt is a perfect choice to play Beane in this context. Billy knows enough
about professional baseball that he has just enough persuasiveness to get his
incredibly doubtful scouts, front office – and his own manager – to go along
with his plans to hire players who can not hit or play outfield but can create
runs. Philip Seymour Hoffman has the role of Art Howe, then the A’s manager who
has no tolerance for the ideas that Beane and Brand are promoted. When a new
rookie is called into play a position that he has never played not even the
minors, Beane tells him it’s not hard. “It’s extremely hard,” Howe says
deadpan.
Moneyball is a superb film, extremely
well-acted and edited, and Sorkin does make an unfilmable subject more than
watchable. But I don’t think the movie would have worked without the sense of sorrow
around Billy Beene and the A’s. The film frames most of his actions around the
20 game winning streak that the A’s managed in the 2002 season. We follow them through
game as it extends, and finally on the night it’s broken. It is the kind of
triumph that is usually the climax of the traditional sports film – but three
minutes later, the A’s season comes to an end in the first round of the
playoffs just like it did the year before (and though the film doesn’t say, the
year before that)
The movie then follows Beene
to Boston where he is offered a job by the Red Sox to run their team using the
exact same methods that the A’s won the division. As we all know by now, the
Red Sox had not won the World Series since 1918, but using sabermetrics two years
later they broke ‘The Curse’. Beene, however, chose to stay with Oakland.
And that’s the sad part of
this movie that I think appealed to Sorkin: like so many creators of a method
that other people perfected, Beene never enjoyed the fruits of his labor. The A’s
would go into a tail spin after the 2003 season, enjoy some success in the early
2010s, but never made it to the World Series, much less ever won the last game
of the season. There was never any sign of huge attendance at Oakland under his
tenure and the pandemic was the nail in the coffin. The A’s will become the
first established franchise to relocate since the Montreal Expos in 2005.
Meanwhile there are still
rich teams and poor teams, though the poor teams may be richer than you think. Almost
every team now uses sabermetrics, and as a result a lot of the fun has gone out
of the game as bunts, stolen bases and shifts have become prominent until the
last year finally got rid of the latter. Players are hired to do one thing well
and still command the same ridiculous salaries for it. Billy Beene did change
the game, but the changes didn’t help him, his team, and a lot of fans – and I
count myself - think that it really hurt
the game. I’m inclined to take the point of the scouts and the managers who
argued against Beene’s revolutionary methods, not because they couldn’t see the
future but because they could and they knew that it would hurt the game they
loved.
The movie ends with a
recording of Beene’s daughter, singing a song with the chorus “You’re Such a
Loser, Dad.” At the time, I found it mainly funny. Now I think it is deeply
ironic, because I’m pretty sure that is how Beene will be viewed in a lot of
baseball circles and certainly in the city of Oakland. He still currently works
for the A’s and may still have his job in 2027 when they play their first
season in Las Vegas. I wonder if he thinks now whether everything he did – including
being played by Brad Pitt in the movie of his life – was worth it.
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