The movie’s argument — that the A’s did things no other team was doing and vastly outperformed expectations because of it — is hampered by the fact that toward the end of the story the A’s are shown being eliminated from the 2002 playoffs by the Minnesota Twins, a team with a virtually identical budget. (The A’s payroll was third lowest in the league that year; the Twins were a single notch up). The movie also says that the Boston Red Sox borrowed Beane’s techniques, hired the Beane-like stats guru Bill James, and rode them to a World Series title in 2004. But that Red Sox team spent hugely, with a payroll that dwarfed that of every team save one (the Yankees, who annually top the charts in player compensation). If the Sox are so “Moneyball,” then why are they this year virtually tied with the Tampa Bay Rays, whose payroll is one-fourth of Boston’s? If Moneyball were correct, the Sox’ combination of wealth and superior insight should make this no contest.
Moreover, the Hill character is based on Paul DePodesta, who far from being a game-changer has bounced from the Dodgers, who had one winning and one losing season while he was there, to the Padres, who were an average team while he was there, to the Mets, who have compiled one losing season since his arrival last year.
Moneyball cheers on lovable losers picked by Beane such as A’s first baseman Scott Hatteberg, who did indeed turn out to be better than anyone but Beane predicted, but Beane-favored catcher Jeremy Brown (who appears at the end of the movie and is a memorable presence in the book) earned himself five games in the big leagues. Ultimately baseball is about spotting talent, and Beane’s record is mixed on this point.
Amusing though it is, Moneyball is guilty of the same sins it ascribes to poor, fat Art Howe and the crusty veteran scouts who are mercilessly lampooned as being idiots who sit around telling each other about how the ball “explodes off the bat” of a hitter whose stats prove to Beane that he can’t play. The movie is simplistic, it’s superficial, it’s dismissive, and it relies on a cliché — that the bold, rude young rebel is necessarily smarter than the stodgy and experienced old hand.
“The movie is simplistic, it’s superficial, it’s dismissive, and it relies on a cliché — that the bold, rude young rebel is necessarily smarter than the stodgy and experienced old hand.”
But tell me, did you like it? I know what I’m NOT watching this weekend.
Your comments that the As didn’t do well this year are irrelevant. The point is that the As introduced a new system of evaluating players that upended recruiting and staffing. They did do that. Then market forces caught up and the big-budget-boys caught on and started using that system because it provided a competitive advantage. Result: As are back in the hole.
Sounds like you’ve got it figured out pretty well.
It’ll probably be an interesting movie, though.
Not sure why Mr. Boot dislikes Billy Beane so much. Anyway, talk about not getting a movie. Or getting it and being bitter about it. This sounds as if the Winkelvoss twins wrote a review of The Social Network.
Moneyball is a movie. Say it again, a MOVIE. The main point which is that Billy Beane, AT THAT TIME, moved more in a direction of a different type statistical analysis than any other GM before him, in order to find value in players (and strategies) that were not being utilized.
That Beane did this cause he had to take a chance in going in another direction cause his A’s could not compete monetarily in terms of signing free agents. Another point, that Beane was looking to increase his percentages of positive run generating outcomes. It is CLEARLY stated in the book that over a short playoff series (5 or 7 games) anything can happen. Beane’s goal for his A’s was to make the playoffs by using the increased percentages over a 162-game season.
To suggest as Mr. Boot does that this methodology would succeed 100% of the time is simply ludicrous beyond words (see his BoSox comments).
Also, since the information and methodologies that Beane was using has become more widespread, the amount of hidden value for certain players has decreased. What Beane and company used to see alone among GM’s is now seen by most GM’s.
PJM would do better to post the musings of a different movie critic.
Good points about the oversimiplication of what Beane’s acheivements may mean. However you’ve left out something as well. Beane and lewis make it clear in the book (haven’t seen the film yet, but will in a few hours!) that they have a small window in which to leverage their advantage in nontraditional statistics before the better financed clubs start copying them. They were right and Sox’s World Series win (with Bill James in tow) and certainly the Yankees under Cashman (npow full empowered, post senior Steinbrenner)show that its not just the small budget teams that are looking for new ways to evaluate talent.
Beane’s central idea was that talent was assessed very poorly–as was certainly shown to be true of his own talents as a player–and so he sought to find talent by the numbers. Now everyone does that, and there is little comparative advantage left in it, which does not make it less necessary. So we are back to assessing talent, at a newer and elevated plane. Statistics are a friend to genius and an excuse for fools.
In any competitive and statistics-obsessed field (e.g., ml baseball, Wall Street) an innovation will work for a while, but then imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Oakland has the misfortune now of being in the same division as the Texas Rangers, who have combined Moneyball’s stats with a much more rigorous approach to pitching. Incidentally, both the A’s and Mets are below .500 this year.
Baseball is the most statistics driven of sports. Beane’s genius was to introduce a few new stats that better evaluate meaningful performance. Using statistics to engage in player arbitrage was very useful to the A’s ten years ago, but now there are fewer opportunities as everyone is using the same stats. Also, money, owner quality, schedule, team spirit, hot streaks, cold streaks, good coaching, etc. will likely always have a greater influence than picking up a few good players on the cheap.
The Anaheim Angels, in fact, were the moneyball champs of 2002. Their lineup consisted of either homegrown talents of castoffs from other teams. The Angels plucked David Eckstein from the Red Sox organization, and Adam Kennedy, Erstad, Spiezio, plus many others were underrated talents.
I was going to comment on how the author missed the point and that since most of baseball now uses the same system to evaluate a players worth as Oakland did thier advantage was going to be short lived. The author sounds bitter and maybe needs to evaluate himself. I hope the movie does well.
-I read the book years ago and thought it was great.
-I saw the movie opening day and thought it was great.
-These kinds of books are all twisted up to make into movies that people will go see en masse.
-What did you expect?
Just saw the film, which is awfully good. And as to the movie not being about statistics, it is made abundantly clear to the average lay (as opposed to baseball specialist) viewer that many players, at the time Beane introduced his system, who had perfectly respectable OBP’s (on base percentages) were undervalued for a whole host of reasons, including their age, appearance and lack of social skills, and were therefore great cheap pickups who could well make a minor market team competitive with the big boys. As other posters have pointed out this gave Beane’s A’s a TEMPORARY advantage, which was lost when his system or variations on it went league-wide.
By the way, this film marks the ascent of Pitt into the ranks of first rate actors. Plus the way Pitt and Jonah Hill play off each other is a thing of beauty.
Bennett Miller’s movie “Capote” asserted that Capote never finished another book after “In Cold Blood” was published in 1966. Actually, Capote published “Music for Chameleons”–a collection of new essays and stories–in 1980, four years before his death, and it spent sixteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Bennett Miller is not a stickler for facts, obviously.
Billy Beane was the keynote speaker at a Society of Actuaries meeting not too long back.
He was the most awesome speaker we ever had. (I’ve been trying to get more “nontraditional” speakers, but it’s been a tough row to hoe – I’m not a meeting organizer, and so can only suggest speakers.)
He brought slides! With correlation coefficients! (It related to pitcher performance and what they were paid)
No, the Moneyball technique will not guarantee a pennant or the World Series. Beane knew that and knows that (as does Michael Lewis) — the main thing was to make the team’s performance as good as he possibly could given his constraints. Maximize the probability of getting to the play-offs, not winning the playoffs themselves (when you’re playing over a hundred games, the odds are more relevant than in a 7-game playoff– or, rather, the variability around the expected value is relatively less in a longer run of games.)
The movie is not intended as a documentary. Everyone knows some details will have been changed. Who cares? Real math and real business decisions generally don’t make for good drama. (Similarly, the way real computer people work also has to be made humorously fictional so that it doesn’t bore people.)
In short: lighten up, Francis.
Furthermore, in his talk, Beane admitted he had to change the metrics he was using, because some of the previously-undervalued players were no longer undervalued as other teams started picking up his management group’s techniques.
He bitched about the publicity Lewis had given him. Of course, said publicity helped any career as a paid speaker, but it did make his job in baseball more difficult.
My two favorite scenes: David Justice in the indoor batting cage and John Henry. Both contained sparkling insightful dialog and were well acted.
I think this film is an Oscar vehicle for both Pitt and screenplay, and possibly Hill in supporting.
The main point of both the movie and the book is that it’s not about the stats, it’s about the market. At the time, guys who avoided making outs but could do little else had little value in baseball. Beane saw that he could build a team that made outs less often than other teams for real cheap. He saw that outs were currency. You get three outs to spend in an inning. The longer you can go without spending your outs the better your chances of winning.
In other sports like basketball and football, the moment you succeed on offense, by scoring, you become defense. But in baseball, succeeding on offense allows you to stay on offense. Theoretically, a team could be on offense forever if they avoided making outs. The stat that measures out-making is the reciprocal of on-base percentage. Beane saw this and realized that certain, not all, high obp guys were cheap, and therefore he could build a low budget team designed to avoid making outs. It doesn’t work any more because now high obp guys are demanding big bucks.
Just wanting to say nice post.