Jeremy’s Tophunder №98: Moneyball

6 min readApr 9, 2020

Adapt or Die.

Brad Pitt (as Billy Beane)’s line lingers over the entire movie. It’s interesting, because the line is (a) mostly true, and also (b) mostly bullshit.

Moneyball is one of those movies that I would like a lot more if I knew less about the true story it’s based on. Obviously, movies based on true stories (especially sports stories) need to be altered slightly for various reasons. You condense and combine certain people into one character. You focus on one area and not others. And obviously, you need to compress a good amount of time into around two hours. With the case of sports, you also need to water down the jargon and technical aspects, so that non-sports viewers are able to follow it.

Moneyball (both the movie and the book it’s based on) suffer from all of these restrictions in some way. But they both remain exceptional pieces of art (or, in the case of the book, journalism) that still resonate years after their release. But before I talk about all of the things I like about the movie, let’s get all of the criticisms out of the way first. And when I go through them, keep in mind that they aren’t reasons that I don’t like the movie (after all, it is one of my 100 favorites). These are the reasons that Moneyball could have finished in my Top 20 if it had gone in a different direction.

The movie sets up Scott Hatteberg to be this tremendous linchpin of the season — the team starts winning like crazy once he’s inserted into the starting lineup on a regular basis. You might walk away from this movie thinking that Hatteberg was an MVP- (or at least All-Star-) caliber player. He wasn’t. He was probably the third-best offensive player on the team. Their best offensive player? Miguel Tejada. He won the American League MVP in 2002. The movie barely mentions him.
Another guy the movie leaves out? Barry Zito. He won the American League Cy Young Award (awarded to the league’s best pitcher). There are literally zero references to Barry Zito in the film.
Pitchers Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder, and third baseman Eric Chavez were all also All-Star-caliber players. Mulder was the 2nd overall pick in 1998. Chavez was the 10th pick in the 1996 draft. Zito was the 9th pick in 1999. Hudson was drafted in the 6th round, and Tejada was signed as an international free agent. All five of these players were drafted or signed in large part through traditional scouting techniques, and were highly regarded prospects around the league. They were decidedly not under-valued, island-of-misfit-toys-type players. They were under-paid, because they were recent draft picks still on rookie contracts. But all of them got huge pay-days as soon as they left Oakland. This was the backbone of the 2002 A’s, and there’s nothing more than passing references to them in the movie.
In addition to Hatteberg, the movie profiles Jeremy Giambi, David Justice, and Chad Bradford. These guys were all perfectly fine players, but in reality, the only one who was substantially better than the replacement-level players the scouts were recommending was Bradford. The guy that Jeremy Giambi got traded away for (John Mabry), when the team didn’t even care who they got back, ended up being Oakland’s best hitting outfielder during the win streak that the movie focuses on.
The movie makes it seem like Beane only discovered statistical analysis because he hired someone away from someone else’s front office. That’s not true either. The A’s had been on the cutting edge of statistical analysis for several years prior to the 2002 season depicted in the movie. Paul DePodesta, Oakland’s assistant GM (Jonah Hill’s character, Peter Brand, is largely based on DePodesta), started in Oakland in 1998.
By the way, for all of the apparent conflict between Beane and Brand at the scouting staff, it should be mentioned that Beane and DePodesta both started their baseball front office careers as scouts. It’s not like they had disdain for the scouting process.
There were two huge takeaways from the book and the movie that got over-simplified to the point of inanity. The first was that Stats are all that matters, and scouting doesn’t. Which is absolutely ridiculous. Scouts are (and were) still incredibly valuable. The point that wasn’t fully hammered home was that very few scouts (Oakland or elsewhere) in 2002 had incorporated advanced statistical analysis into their player analysis. It was exploiting an inefficiency. That’s the second over-simplification. “Moneyball” is not (and should not be) synonymous with “statistical analysis.” It’s about finding value where other teams don’t. There are a finite number of roster spots on each team, and each team has a budget set by their ownership, so it’s about deciding where to spend those dollars. If you can find players under-valued by other teams (regardless of the method), that’s what “Moneyball” is supposed to represent. Yes, the easiest and most common way to do this is by being a step ahead of everyone else when it comes to statistical analysis, but to suggest that “Moneyball” just means “stats” is disingenuous and reductive.

ANYWAY, Brad Pitt’s line “adapt or die” -IS- a key component of Moneyball. You need to be on the cutting edge in order to stay competitive. You need to blend together all of the available information in order to make the best possible decisions. But at the same time, it wasn’t like the 2002 A’s were throwing a 40-ton oil tanker into reverse in the span of one off-season.

So, after crapping on the movie for the last 10 paragraphs, why does it make it into the Top 100?

I mean, it’s a baseball movie. At this point in my life, baseball is probably my favorite sport (another sign that I’m getting old), and I spend way more time than I probably should poring over baseball stats online. So a movie (largely) about baseball stats is right in my wheelhouse.

Like I said, if I knew less about baseball, and less about the statistical revolution that took place in the early 2000s, I would love this movie unconditionally. Brad Pitt is spectacular. It’s a snappy script with great dialogue and Pitt brings his A game. There are six Brad Pitt movies in my Top 100, and this one might be my favorite performance of all of them. And as good as Pitt is, Jonah Hill might be even better. Hill isn’t exactly known for reserved, measured performances. He’s usually either screaming at Michael Cera or masturbating at a Leonardo DiCaprio pool party. A calm and subdued Jonah Hill was surprising, and it was a revelation. And obviously, Phillip Seymour Hoffman is magnificent as always.

The baseball scenes are also great. The way they’re lit (darkly) and shot (often in slow motion) offers a lot of depth and weight to the movie, and really makes up for the fact that neither Pitt nor Hill are in the scene. Technically and artistically, it’s an amazing movie. The only gripes I have are with how the story was simplified to be Hollywood-friendly. So while I don’t like it enough for it to pace the field, I certainly like it enough for it to find it’s way onto the list at №98.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

6. The Fugitive

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

17. Ocean’s 11

22. Remember The Titans

24. Apollo 13

27. All The President’s Men

30. The Lion King

31. The Lost World: Jurassic Park