There was no reason to think this was even filmable, was there? Despite my enthusiasm for the Michael Lewis book -- I've read it four times, I think, and maybe the most fun I have ever had at a ballgame was at a meaningless laugher on a Sunday afternoon in Toronto against the A's right after my wife and I had both finished reading the book for the first time that we refer to as Moneyball Day -- but when a movie adaptation was announced roughly one million years and several rewrites ago, the very notion seemed to me absurd. Like, what's the narrative arc, even? As amazing as those dirt-cheap hundred-win teams were -- and if you do not believe in the magnitude of Billy Beane's achievement, you must be way better at Baseball Mogul than I am or will ever be -- I spoiler nothing by telling you that the Oakland Athletics have yet to win a championship under the guidance of Billy Beane. And the Oakland draft of 2002 that Lewis makes so much of in the book never really turned out to be especially good. And the A's are still a sadsack broke-as-hell team with a horrible stadium and probably no long term future in Oakland. So what do you even make the movie about, really?
Billy Beane, haunted by his own past in the game as a failed can't-miss prospect, is open to new ideas about the valuation of baseball players; these new ideas are provided by a somewhat Paul Depodesta-like Peter Brand (with much, much talk of Bill James); the A's win twenty straight games and thus pull off another great season despite losing Giambi and Damon (and Isringhausen, sure); in recognition of his achievements, Beane is offered a contract by forward-thinking and dapper Red Sox owner John Henry that would make him the most highly paid GM in all of sports; Beane declines amid flashbacks of the lone decision he has made in his life based solely on money (signing with the Mets rather than attending Stanford) and family concerns. So, the book, basically. The book.
And it all works. It totally works. There are of course plenty of nits that can be picked, as with anything based on a true story, but all of the changes make dramatic sense, even if they upset Keith Law. Does it make baseball sense that Billy Beane would fly to Cleveland to suggest a few minor deals in the office of Mark Shapiro? I guess not, but dramatically, it's a scene that motivates Beane's interest in Brand, a fat guy who seems to know what Billy's up to, a little. Also, it's really funny. Getting bent of shape about details like that position you as an enemy of fun and quite possibly the arts, in my view. The only thing that had me scratching my head a little is when the movie makes it seem like Jeremy Giambi was a new addition to the A's lineup in 2002, rather than the guy who didn't slide in the 2001 ALDS, not because I think that's an important detail that needed to be represented, but because I thought for a minute maybe I was remembering it wrong. But of course I was not, and I put the matter out of my head entirely when Jeremy Giambi danced with his pants half down in the clubhouse. There are perhaps hairs that could be split, were one so inclined, but come on. You love this movie.
The main thing I want to communicate to you about Moneyball is that it, and everyone in it, is awesome. Just awesome. That Brad Pitt is one of our finest actors in addition to being almost offensively good looking -- in Jonah Hill's words, from an entertaining but nonessential interview on The Howard Stern Show last week, "It's fucked up, how good looking he is" -- is widely known, so why belabour the point, but holy shit is he awesome in this. I applaud his ongoing, systematic efforts to make himself look physically bad on camera, which is I think what all the eating is about, but it's not working.
Jonah Hill's Peter Brand is surprisingly well drawn, and not the complete caricature of a spreadsheet enthusiast I expected when I heard that Depodesto didn't care to have his name used in the movie. Brand, despite his reasoned, rational approach to the mathematical problem of winning ballgames, is still a romantic. Why else walk around with a baseball in your hand? What a nice touch that was. He's a Jamesian, fully realized: there's nothing cold and unfeeling about anything Bill James has ever written, despite the way he sometimes get discussed. It's impossible to read Bill James and not come away with a sense of his unfailingly, romantic, obviously silly love of baseball, right? Rejecting sportwriterly cant and the unthinking acceptance of old saws, and looking for novel answers to the old questions of the game doesn't make you a robot. It might very well make you someone like Peter Brand, though. I was surprised that Brand was as well drawn as he was, actually, given that it was not a character Depodesto wanted to be attached to, but I think I get it: Depodesto is still very much trying to make his way in baseball, and the dismissive "Google Boy" tag that dogged him during his too-brief tenure in Los Angeles has proven hard to live down. Given the extent to which the very, very old men who still write baseball stories for newspapers have taken this movie's release as an opportunity to rail against all things Billy Beane, the last thing Paul Depodesto needs is to be any closer to any of that. I get it, or at least think I get it; maybe that's not it at all.
Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of Art Howe has come under fire from, well, just from Art Howe, I guess, actually. He called it "character assassination," and has actually blamed Billy Beane for it, in a fantastic recapitulation of the whole "Billy Beane shouldn't have written that book" Joe Morgan situation of a decade ago (that it was Joe Morgan's voice set against the images of the A's failing in the 2002 playoffs is perfect). Honestly, I thought Howe emerged as an entirely sympathetic character in this telling: working on a short-term contract, Howe is asked to mange his team in a way that is well and good for Beane and Brand and their grand scheme, but will be utterly indefensible to the twenty-nine other non-Billy Beane GMs that Howe is going to have to justify this to in order to, you know, work. If Beane extends him, fine; he'll be happy to buy in. Otherwise, this seems to Howe professional suicide. That's perfectly reasonable, isn't it? Hoffman was great; the character made sense; and if Art Howe is upset with it, I think he might not be great at watching movies.
Very much unlike Art Howe, I have no complaints, really. Moneyball gets it right. It speaks to the constant tension between reason and emotion that is at the heart of not just Billy Beane as a character -- trading Jeremy Giambi, posterboy for his rationalist experiment, in a fit of pique (remember the Giambi for Mabry thread on Baseball Primer, with people trying to figure out a rational explanation for it, because there had to be one, because it was Billy Beane?) -- but at the heart of the game itself, of our experience of it as players, as fans, as writers, as readers. However it is we engage with baseball, that's how and why it moves us, I think, this kind of Apollonian/Dionysian interplay that is no doubt best left to Roger Angell to describe in prose, but that Moneyball manages to put perfectly on the screen.
KS
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