I like the occasional baseball game, but I would not call myself a fan. After seeing this movie, I have a new found respect for the game and now have some understanding of the essence of the debate between statistics team building and let's call it the intangibles, heart, fate, intensity, collegiality.
But what I found most about the movie is that it translated to all walks of life and causes us to pause about the decisions we have made, the ones we ought to have made, and the ones we will make in the future, even if the future before us is relatively short.
The movie is based on the true story of Billy Beane, 44 years old circa the beginning of the 21st century, and working as the GM of the Oakland Athletics. As told to us in spare flashbacks, as a young high school graduate, he had the choice of a lucrative baseball contract based upon the opinion of the scouts that he was an all around player (could do most or all of the positions) who would be big in the world of baseball, or going to Stanford University. He could not do both. He chose baseball, and his career was let's say, lackluster. Some said he did not have the fire in the belly or lacked confidence, but he was washed up pretty early as a player. Still he loved the game and stayed in it behind the scenes.
When we meet him he is terse, not apparently easy to get along with, divorced, cynical. He does not attend the games. He has tried to make the A's competitive with teams like the Yankees, with none of the money that those teams have to spend on talent or anything else. Unable to get more money and meeting a young man working for the Cleveland Indians from whom he tries to pry some decent players, he becomes fascinated by the young man's assessment of players based on rather complicated statistical templates. In this scenario, players that might be good for a team are not the ones that traditional baseball expertise would choose. In fact, traditional baseball would avoid these players like the plague. Beane hires the nerdy, portly kid (based upon a true character I am told who declined to allow his real name to be used for the movie) and over objection from back room to team manager, he cobbles together a motley crue of players, includng an oldster at 37 and a young decent hitting injured kid who used to be a catcher, to whom he assigns first base, which has never been his position. The common denominator statistically of all these guys, is that they get on base.
At first it is a mess. The team loses every game. The press and the pundits attack wildly as is their characteristic to do. They blame Beane. Then suddenly just before the All Star game, the A's start to win, to an unprecendented 20 games, a record maker. The press, in its infinite wisdom, now offers its accolades not to Beane but to the manager of the team (a finely tuned performance by Phillip Seymour Hoffman).
There is not, however, a happy ending. The Oakland A's do not win the World Series. They lose. The general conclusion of those in the know is that the method of team building did not work. As Beane says, it is does not matter what happens before the final game. You lose. It's all bad even, especially the successes that led up to it. You and yours are duds.
One perspicacious owner, however, of the Boston Red Sox, still encumbered by the Curse of the Bambino, sees something in Beane and his method (actually the brain child of another man not in baseball), and offers him the largest sum ever for a General Manager.
Beane does not take it.
Purportedly using the statistical method (and those in baseball know can rightly debate whether or not any method alone explains failure or success in baseball; this is beyond my expertise), without Beane, as everyone knows the Sox ultimately broke the Curse.
Meanwhile, Beane is still with the Athletics today.
Why did he turn down the Sox? Because he once made a decision based on the promise of money, and the guarantee of a success that never came. Now, as a song by his young daughter, reminds him, it isn't about success it is about the "show". It is about what you love. It is about making that difference. It is about those intangibles, and damn the opinions of the press or other knowing pundits, who in truth and in fact, have no great insight into reality.
In the eyes of the world, Beane is a loser, but in every way that matters, he is a winner.
I loved this movie. An un-baseball baseball movie appealing to fans and non-fans alike.
Go, see it. Brad, you weren't on my unimportant list of great actors before, but this performance really was exceptional. Good for you! Good for us!
Enjoy the show, folks. It is very short. Make the decisions you believe are best, not the ones that others press upon you.
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