Movie Review? Sure: Moneyball

So this is going to be a pretty special feature, with this post appearing both here, on Brewing Beerball, but also on my movies blog, Cream City Movie Review. Never really though I'd get that fun overlap, but here we are.

I was kind of hoping I could kind of just copy and paste this review, as it would be easy, and there would be serious overlap, but when I first wrote this for Cream City I wanted to talk so much baseball, but didn't want to explain, so this will largly be a rewrite with less movie, and much more baseball talk.

So, I really wanted to see this movie. Largly because of my love of baseball and my enjoyment of the book, but also because of the awesome cast and crew that was rounded up for this feature. The director here is Bennett Miller, the writer is Oscar Nominee Aaron Sorkin. The book you should all probably know (of the same title, plus "The Art of Winning an Unfair Game) by Michael Lewis, who is also the man responsible for the book behind the film Blind Side. On the Cast side we start with Brad Pitt as the main character Billy Beane. Jonah Hill does a fine job as his assistant, Peter Brand, and Philip Seymour Hoffman supports as the A's Manager, Art Howe.

First, a quick rant. I'm not a huge fan of making movies about things in progress. Blindside is about a guy who is still in the NFL. Social Network as about a guy who still runs Facebook. Moneyball is about a guy who still heads the A's. I blame the trend in reality television, oh well.

Moneyball follows Billy Beane through a baseball season with him at the helm of the generally broke Oakland A's. He realizes that considering the disparaging amount of resources at the disposal of different teams he must do something different. The movie chronicles what happened to him over the course of this season, and also looks back at Beane's own life.

The story overall, is great. The acting great. The visuals great. I think it does a pretty fine job of energizing what really isn't a whole lot of anything. It's people taking about baseball, and as much as I myself love to do that, making a movie about it doesn't seem entirely intriging. Michael Lewis' book was fun because it described in much more detail the people involved. Some of the players and secondary staff introduced in the movie have entire chapters in the book. So that was handled well. I saw the film with my mother, who is not a sports person. She like it even more than I did. I'll say that's because I happen to know more about baseball than the movie showed, and really the story of Beane is kinda old by now. On a sad note, one of my favorite lines of the book, which I very seriously burst out in laughter while reading, was left out. "Prince Fielder was too fat even for the Oakland A's".

Now, to get basebally. An interesting thing of note is the character Peter Brand. When I saw the movie I said to myself, "Why don't I know this guy's name?". I knew he was still in baseball, but couldn't place him. Well, Brand represents Paul DePodesta of course. Apparently DePodesta was the only person involved who would not give permission for his likeness to be used for the movie. Cheers to him. He is currently the VP of Player Development and Scouting for the Mets.

This movie is of course exactly that, a movie. It portrays the A's season as a single magical thing with any real background, and gives probably both Beane and "Brand" too much credit for introducing SABR and advanced metrics into baseball. At least Bill James was discussed in the film. There are some very good books out there on the history of statistics in baseball, I can't place the title now, but it really is worth looking into.

On more of a Brewers type note, I kind of liked the portrayl of Art Howe, who was shown to be very much a "baseball guy" with how he played the game, much to Beane's chagrin. It shows that when the team really started to win, Howe finally listened to Beane. Now this was a criticism of Ken Macha when he came over to helm Milwaukee. Sure he had been a winner in Oakland, but they had good pitching and Billy Beane is the true Manager of the A's... kinda seemed that way during his time with the Crew...

I'm getting pretty long winded, but here's for a pretty quick musing. So Oakland, who was the earliest, and still may be the most involved franchise with advanced metrics and whatnot, has done an awesome job of drafting pitchers, but have not done much at all in the way of developing position players. I wonder if there is correlation of numbers here. If pitchers are going to be good have they always put up numbers? Are hitters more likely to grow and develop in a way which stats themselves don't and can't show accurately, which then neccesitates the use of uber subjective rating systems which Beane rejects? Interesting thoughts. Though Oakland mighta hit the nail on the head with Jemille Weeks... Brewer's did draft him earlier though, stupid college.

That's it for now. More for serious Baseball talk later. Not much moving in the Free Agent market now, but winter meetings next week, and I'll totally amp up the blogging for that.