Movie review: Moneyball

Moneyball is a semi-biographical film, starring Brad Pitt (Inglorious Basterds, Oceans 11-13, Fight Club), Jonah Hill (Superbad, Knocked Up) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (The Boat That Rocked, Charlie Wilson’s War, Capote), which tells the story of how the Oakland Athletics (better known as the Oakland A’s) reversed their 2001 baseball season performance with a minimal budget and the use of statistics. The film is a dramatisation of Michael Lewis’ 2003 book of the same name.

The film is an account of how Oakland’s general manager Billy Beane (Pitt) hired Yale economics graduate Peter Brand (Hill) as assistant GM to help assemble a new team with a relatively small budget. Small, at the time, was USD 40 million, which is about a third of the money being spent by the top teams in the league.

The story line, from a statistical point of view, is how the data can reveal a different picture from commonly perceived wisdom or prejudice. Beane’s management team is portrayed as a collection of old cronies and hangers-on, whose player selection method is based on “likes”,”dislikes” and rumours about form or injury, without apparent consideration of true performance. Brand, on the other hand, is portrayed as a true baseball geek, and a true geek – being pudgy, nerdy, far from athletic, and happier with a computer than people. It is an odd, stereotypical, choice given that tThe Brand character is fictional. In real life, Brand’s equivalent is Paul DePodesta, who is slim, Harvard (not Yale) educated, and a former baseball player. Brand/DePodesta is an ardent believer in methods developed by baseball historian, writer and statistician Bill James, who is credited as being the first person to use data and statistical methods to analyse player and team performance. James is credited with the term “sabermetrics” which derives from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).

As one would expect, the statistical aspects of the the storyline are reduced to playing the percentages. That is, Beane and Brand use the averages to gain competitive advantage over other teams. However, there is a hidden salutary message, in that statistics can only tell us what will happen on average, and says very little about individual events. I liked this because I felt it was a nice message about consideration of variation as well as the mean.

Overall, this was a generally enjoyable movie. It has been nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture. Some of the crunch points were lost on me and other members of the audience, because of our unfamiliarity with the rules and structure of a baseball game and the league as a whole. Don’t let this put you off, however. It is a fun David and Goliath-type story and will appeal to all.

Update: The use of fictional character Peter Brand was at Paul DePodesta’s request