Pitt is great in ‘Moneyball’
You don’t have to know about VORP – or WHIP, or OPS – to enjoy “Moneyball,” the story of how a bunch of stat geeks changed the way baseball teams assess and acquire players.
Sure, it helps if you’re a fan of the sport and if you’ve read Michael Lewis’ breezy and engaging best-seller “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.”
But what’s most pleasing about the film doesn’t really have to do with baseball.
As Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s general manager who pioneered the experimental statistics-based philosophy called sabermetrics, Brad Pitt is at his charismatic best – a little weary, a little weathered, with a complexity that only makes him more appealing.
We see him rage in his infamously volatile fashion when things go wrong, but we also see him make himself vulnerable: He’s embracing this approach as a result of his own failure.
Beane was a highly-touted high school prospect who turned down a scholarship to Stanford to play for the New York Mets. But his professional career was brief, and he never lived up to the hype.
This inspired him to value players for more pragmatic reasons than the traditional methods old-school scouts use. The most important thing, he reasoned, is getting on base. And some of the players who get on base most often happen to be undervalued, perhaps older or a little banged-up.
That means they come at bargain prices – which is crucial when you’ve got a fraction of the payroll of big-market teams.
As he ventures into this brave new world at the start of the 2002 season, having lost in agonizing fashion to the New York Yankees in the 2001 post-season, his trusty (and fictional) sidekick is Peter Brand, a 25-year-old Yale economics graduate and follower of sabermetrics guru Bill James.
Jonah Hill is at his best here, too, as Brand. Halting and almost humorless, Hill ultimately finds the quiet confidence in this character, and he and Pitt bounce off each other beautifully.
The scenes in which they banter represent the best “Moneyball” has to offer. Yes, they’re talking about baseball, but the intelligence of their interactions and the bond they forge transcend sport.
Similarly, though, the things that are wrong with the movie have nothing to do with baseball, either.
Fundamentally, there’s a problem with the pacing in director Bennett Miller’s film. “Moneyball” never feels like it’s building toward anything, even if you know how the A’s season unfolded that year. It plays out in starts and stops, and then all of a sudden, we’re in the midst of the team’s historic 20-game win streak.
A subplot involving Beane’s daughter, which wasn’t part of the book, also seems like a wedged-in device to humanize him. And ultimately it seems odd to romanticize this figure who sought to strip the sport of its long-held romanticism.
But like the A’s themselves at this time, “Moneyball” has enough unlikely pieces that do work – and it generates enough underdog goodwill – to make you want to stick around for the final out.