Essay: When In Doubt, Watch 'Moneyball'

It's on 'Netflix.' Simple.

Photo: Columbia Pictures

I hit a wall last night. The news. The winter. Good ol’ fashioned anxiety. Luckily, as I congealed on my couch, I was able to focus all of my energy — my life force — into my thumb, which then had the strength to press the play button on my remote control, and that’s how I ended up watching the 2011 sports drama Moneyball on Netflix until the wee hours.

This is the sixth or seventh time I’ve seen it.

I don’t want to suggest that a smart, surprisingly poetic, true-life movie about baseball statistics, office politics, and following your heart somehow snapped me out of my midnight doldrums. But it didn’t make things worse. When I woke up this morning, my first thought was this quote from the movie:

“We’re all told at some point in time that we can no longer play the children’s game, we just don’t… don’t know when that’s gonna be. Some of us are told at eighteen, some of us are told at forty, but we’re all told.”

That’s what a Mets baseball scout tells young Billy Beane, the future General Manager of the underdog Oakland Athletics ball club, as he offers the kid a contract. Billy’s baseball dreams will fail, but he does something more meaningful later in life: he changes a game — and an industry — that hadn’t changed in 150 years.

That quote was meaningful to me because it’s obviously about death. Yes, baseball, too. Of course. Obviously. Careers, too. Media! But mostly death. Today, I was not told. Maybe tomorrow. So keep playing. When in doubt, watch Moneyball. There is no substitute for therapy or medication or twelve-step programs or the human community, but the movie is a good time.

Moneyball is a star vehicle; that star is Brad Pitt, an actor with a prom king’s confidence and a theatre kid’s heart. As Billy Beane, Pitt is a middle-aged man who is still hungry to win and frustrated by the institutional inertia of his team, which cannot compete with world champions like the Yankees or the Red Sox, wealthy organizations that can spend their way to a pennant. Billy decides to try a few radical new tricks, which pisses off all the old dogs. Let that be a lesson: take responsibility for your actions, but do it your way. Like Sinatra sang.

For a movie that’s most jocks talking in offices and locker rooms, Moneyball is riveting. It’s a philosophical street fight between wishes and data, yesterday and tomorrow. As I dozed off, I wondered what it was like to be the first doctor in the 18th or 19th Century to suggest curing diseases with leeches wasn’t a great idea. His new idea must have been mocked.

This is my second favorite Pitt performance, my first being his recent turn as a loyal stuntman in Quentin Tarantino’s hyperviolent dude fairy tale Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. What’s number three? Thanks for asking. Fight Club. Have you seen Fury? It’s a mean World War II movie about tank warfare, and Pitt is a superb bastard.

But Moneyball is also a duet. Jonah Hill turns in my second favorite performance of his long career as Beane’s math genius Sancho Panza, Peter Brand, a Yale-educated economist who sells Beane on the idea that he shouldn’t buy players, he should buy skills. The only thing that matters is winning and runs, and you have to reverse engineer those wins. During one of the best scenes in the movie, Pitt explains to his scouts not to look for another star like Jason Giambi but to recreate him in the aggregate. To, in effect, build a mathematical Frankenstein Giambi out of cheaper misfit players no one wants.

These scouts all talk like ancient gravel-voiced oracles. To them, the players are lottery tickets picked for their looks, poise, and overall baseball-ness. Instead, Billy wants them to find players who are good at getting to first base, the first step to a home run. He’s not interested in their beauty pageant judge hokum. They're as resistant to Billy’s new vision as the A’s coach, Art Howe, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. It’s a small role, but Hoffman is excellent as an over-the-hill fart who refuses to grow.

Oh, what’s my top Hill movie? Come on. The Wolf of Wall Street. Third? Superbad. Jonah Hill is subdued as Peter Brand, a nervous kid with a big idea. Hill is a naturally cunning performer, and he lends that to Brand, who almost everyone at the Oakland Coliseum underestimates.

Director Bennett Miller knows the secret to a movie like Moneyball: keep your eye on the stars and the will-they-win-or-won’t-they story. He doesn't get in the way of Pitt and his character’s quest to score. Moneyball is about failing, and adapting, and trying again.

The movie is based on Michael Lewis’ 2003 bestseller named Moneyball about the Oakland A’s unusual 2002 season, which included a record-breaking winning streak and the out-of-the-ordinary strategies used to turn a bunch of discount sluggers into a competitive team. The screenplay was co-written by Steven Zaillian, who has written some epics, including the scripts for Schindler’s List and Gangs of New York, and Hollywood egghead Aaron Sorkin, playwright. Moneyball is a brilliant screenplay, and it may be one of the best things Sorkin has ever worked on. There are moments of dialogue that bear his trademark intensity and wit but without his know-it-all machismo. At his most self-indulgent, Sorkin’s characters may as well deliver a zinger, then look into the camera and whisper, “Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin” before moving on to the following line.

Moneyball is for baseball fans. Yes. It’s also for anyone who has wanted to try something new. Who has taken a risk, put themselves out there, and endured the mockery and doubt from those who like things just the way they are.

I am not a fan of baseball or any organized sports. However, I will go to a baseball game if invited. It’s a surprisingly relaxing way to waste an afternoon, just sitting in a park with tens of thousands of other people cheering on beefy men running in circles, turning and turning. I root for whoever my friends are rooting for. I dutifully applaud and stand and boo along with everyone else as if I’m at the most exciting church service ever.

I also love hot dogs. There are so many different kinds of delicious foods at ballparks, of course, but a couple of hot dogs slathered in nuclear yellow mustard and washed down with a tankard of soda pop? Delightful.

The romance of baseball is referenced multiple times in Moneyball, and baseball is deeply romantic. Baseball is a game, and so is life, and vice versa. But in baseball, a lifetime’s heartbreak and triumph can play out in three hours or more, hundreds of times a season. The mighty can fall in an inning, and the meek can rise just as suddenly, and it’s glorious if your team wins and a shame if they don’t, but wait till next time. I once took a brief nap during a game at Citifield and was roused by a homerun. Exciting! I celebrated with a comically large pretzel. Yay, Mets!

Watch Moneyball. It’s low-key inspiring.

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