Final Rating: 5/5
Blu-Ray Recommendation: Recommend
How can you not be romantic about baseball? Moneyball is a 2011 film, directed by Bennett Miller, chronicling the 2002 Oakland Athletics baseball team that won 103 games and along the way changed the sport forever by the way they evaluated talent and chose what to prioritize.
The film, which stars Brad Pitt as A’s General Manager Billy Beane, a former first round draft pick that eventually flamed out of the sport due to unreasonable expectations and unrealized potential who worked his way up the front office department to be the person who makes decisions.
After losing to the New York Yankees in the 2001 playoffs, the A’s lost a number of their marquee players to free agency as the team could not match the payrolls of the big spending teams. Jason Giambi left for $120 million to play for the Yankees, Johnny Damon left for $31 million to play for the Boston Red Sox and Jason Isringhausen left for $27.5 million to play for the St. Louis Cardinals. The A’s could simply not compete with those numbers so Beane had to pivot.
When Beane was visiting Cleveland’s front office to discuss potential trades, he met Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a special assistant to General Manager Mark Shapiro, who seemingly has his ear. Beane brings him aboard the team as an Assistant General Manager to help the team find undervalued players that can be had for cheap. Brand, who is actually based on a man named Paul DePodesta (who is now the President of Baseball Operations for the Colorado Rockies) is a disciple of Bill James, a man who in his spare time wrote reams of books about how the statistics being used to judge baseball were bad metrics and he had come up with formulas better likened to evaluate talent.
The issue with Bill James and his sabermetrics community (the use of advanced stats as they are now known as) was that because he was an outsider who never played the game and it bucked nearly 100 years of what is called the eye test that he was called a kook and anyone who took him seriously didn’t belong in baseball.
Beane and Brand, who together put together a team full of scrappy players who were overlooked due to unconventional styles, suffered from low confidence or were past their prime and paid too much and managed to win 103 games and win their division. Unfortunately the Cinderella run ended in the first round where they lost in five games to the Minnesota Twins.
But they won by starting a growing change of evaluating the game. In the years that followed the season where author Michael Lewis followed the team and wrote the book Moneyball, every team birthed an analytics department. Eventually the very nature of trying to win on a budget spread to all 30 teams meaning the market inefficiencies that the A’s could afford became the same intel that the Yankees, Red Sox and Dodgers could also exploit.
The film is a career highlight for Pitt, who oozes the needed charm and confidence of a former big leaguer who now answers to no one except for the team’s owner. The screenplay, which was written by heavyweights Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin have packed the script filled with incredible dialogue and one liners. Most sports films are about underdogs and the adversity they have to face and the Oakland Athletics David team where they were outspent by over $60 million dollars against the Goliath New York Yankees makes them incredibly easy to root for.
Jonah Hill had started to dabble a little bit in non-comedic centered roles but was considered a strange pick at the time to play a serious baseball AGM. He utterly shines as a man with more brains than confidence and was deservingly rewarded with a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. Chris Pratt has never been better as Scott Hatteberg, a catcher who needs to move off his position due to an injury and the uphill battle he faces trying to learn first base (a ball being hit in his direction is his greatest fear naturally).The family drama still doesn’t quite work, and while Kerris Dorsey is adorable as Beane’s daughter, Casey, the scenes just make you want to get back to the paper pushing antics of Beane and Brand.
The film has been released on 4K Ultra HD and it looks stunning. Despite being a baseball movie, the film is more about numbers and the process of evaluation. It has more in common with ‘good at your job’ films like All The President’s Men than it does with Major League or Bull Durham. Unsurprisingly though, the major baseball set piece when the A’s are trying to win their 20th game in a row and includes recreation of actual game play is beyond stunning. The grass is so crisp and green you feel like you can reach out and feel the texture. Miller utilizes a lot of shots of computer screens and showing screens of real game footage from the A’s and the lowfi aesthetic pops with this upgrade.
The disc is loaded with special features. There are several deleted and extended scenes, including one that shows Beane has moved on from his ex-wife (Robin Wright) and is dating again, a factoid that is included in the book but removed from the film for pacing purposes. There is a blooper scene that consists entirely of Brad Pitt trying to hold back laughter for three minutes of a single take as Jonah Hill keeps mockingly chastising him.
There are also a few featurettes that go behind the scenes interviewing everyone from Michael Lewis to screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and even the real Billy Beane. They also highlight the actors and actual baseball players who were hired to play members of the team including Stephen Bishop (who played David Justice), Casey Bond (who played Chad Bradford) and Chris Pratt (Scott Hatteberg). Ken Medlock who played the head scout most vocally against Billy Beane’s new philosophy was an actual baseball scout who believed Beane was ruining the game and is given a chance to talk about his role in the movie.
The film is one of the greatest sports films ever made and this edition gives it a very deserving release. The slipcover utilizes great alternate art that shows Beane standing alone in the outfield, highlighting the vastness that is a baseball diamond. It’s a shame the Oakland Athletics have come crashing down so far, the team is now two owners removed from the one in the film and he is abandoning the great city of Oakland to move the team to Vegas despite the city still having a strong fanbase. Luckily for us, the perfect A’s team exists in Moneyball.
Thank you Allied Vaughn and Movie Zyng for the screener.
Buy your copy of Moneyball here: https://moviezyng.com/ulafxj
