Bennett Miller’s Moneyball is a semi-biographical baseball drama written by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin. It is based on Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. The story revolves around the struggles of Oakland A’s general manager, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt). He is a former professional baseball player completely disenchanted with baseball having been overrun by a few extremely rich teams. For instance, the New York Yankees had massive spending power – $126 million for the 2002 season – while the A’s were working with half, and sometimes just a third – $41 million in 2002 – of the money available to their competitors.
Buy Moneyball from MovieZyngBeane is also not happy with the old ways of scouting players. He feels that scouts stole his scholarship to Stanford by handing him a big check to play pro ball. He knows it was his own decision, but it still stings. Beane meets Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), an analyst for the Cleveland Indians, and poaches him into the position of Assistant General Manager for the A’s. Brand is a baseball junky who has put all his faith in a system known as sabermetrics that crunches numbers in a way where teams can scout current players and find those that are undervalued. Their main goal is to find inexpensive players who may have some fatal flaw (no longer able to throw as well, slowing down, other injuries, and aging out) but who still get on base more than many, or better yet, most players.
Almost all of the team’s scouts and the A’s manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), are completely against these new strategies and push back against Beane and Brand any way they are able. But Beane is the General Manager, and the A’s ownership backs his plan. Beane and Brand begin to go after the “undesirables” and build a team that instantly goes 0 for 7 to start the season. Most of the scouts are angry and Howe refuses to put a former catcher, Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), at first base, a position he has never played. It doesn’t help that Hatteberg is afraid the ball might be hit toward him.
Moneyball is a movie about ideas, especially how statistics might be able to completely change the game of baseball forever. It has less baseball action than pretty much any other baseball movie out there. In fact, because of his severe superstition, combined with a heavy dose of anxiety, Beane doesn’t even like to watch the games. Therefore, this is not the sort of sports-driven movie you have watched in the past. But that is the beauty of Moneyball. Its focus is what is happening off the field which leads to great moments in the back rooms and the clubhouse. The scenes between Beane and Howe crackle with energy; unfortunately, there is far too little of their banter.
Buy Moneyball from AmazonUsually, deleted scenes are deleted for a reason; however, Moneyball is an odd case where the deleted scenes feel like a real loss to narrative tension and continuity. In one deleted scene, Beane is having dinner with his second wife (Kathryn Morris) – a role cut completely from the final edit – and she is able to calm Beane about one of his deepest fears (having the winningest streak in AL history without winning the final game of the World Series) and adds a needed counterpoint to Billy’s obsessions and anxieties. There are also a couple scenes between Billy Beane and Art Howe that explain Billy’s actions in two other scenes that come off as slightly unclear in the final cut. Moneyball is a great film, but the deleted scenes hint at an even better one: in other words, Moneyball needs a director’s cut.
