Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players. Your goal should be to buy wins. In order buy wins, you need to buys runs.
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To put it simply, Moneyball is a great movie. Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill are excellent, and Bennett Miller’s direction combines with a script by the legendary Aaron Sorkin to create a perfectly paced, engaging, eminently watchable film.
As for the facts, it’s hit-and-miss, with an emphasis on miss. Many of the changes make sense. It’s simpler to create a lone character — Hill’s Peter Brand — as an amalgam of the team of advisors at the heart of the A’s moneyball strategy. And it’s more satisfying to remove nuance and celebrate Billy Beane’s devil-may-care innovation that pioneered analytics in baseball, precipitating a dramatic shift as to how teams evaluate players.
Beane and the A’s were absolutely part of the inception of a new era, but it was a much smaller, far more mixed role than the book and movie imply. It depicts the A’s as a team betting on brand new strategies that the rest of the idiots running teams rejected out of hand until they saw the A’s success. In reality, sabermetrics (the general name for the sort of analysis seen in the film) was being utilized by teams to varying degrees by all of baseball since the 90s. Don’t get me wrong, Beane has done great work in his career. That’s clearly evidenced by the fact that he was the A’s general manager for 18 years, before becoming executive vice president of baseball operations in 2016. Being a general manager in baseball is often a thankless job, and 16 years is an impressive length of time to keep the job for the same team. In the current era, Beane’s tenure is surpassed only by Yankees GM Brian Cashman’s 22 years on the job. He’s a talented front office executive, he’s just not the unqualified genius pioneer the movie depicts.
A really great description of the exaggeration of Beane and the A’s role in the rise of sabermetrics, in far more detail, is Allan Barra’s writeup for the Atlantic back in 2011.
For my money, the most egregious omission in the film was leaving out the players who played the biggest role in the team’s success during that period. For one, the primary reason for that team’s success was the pitching of Tim Hudson, Barry Zito, and Mark Mulder. They were a fearsome, unrivaled 1-2-3 punch giving the team a favorable pitching matchup for 60% of their games. And then there’s Miguel Tejada, an MVP who was the heart of the A’s offense for the entire era of perennial playoff appearances.
Again, I love the movie. But it seems important to separate fact from fiction in the myth of Billy Beane.
Up next: A League of Their Own, one of the best loved baseball movies of all time.
