Review of Moneyball (2011) by Patricia O — 24 Jan 2013

The Oakland A's have a player payroll dwarfed by the big name teams - the monster Yankees, the benighted Red Sox, but a loyal following. How did Billy Beane, a player who failed his predictions of stardom, build a fighting team?

By using player stats and creating predictive computer software models to identify under-valued players who could be hired and molded to "beat the stats" and become a winning team. It's called "sabermetric theory" in the baseball biz.

I remember hearing the same concept when I researched Janus Funds in the 1980's to begin investing: their research was so deep and effective they could identify under-valued companies whose worth would increase SOONER rather than later - this was all and good, but we all know what happened to them.

Billy Beane, as depicted by Aaron Sorkin's smart script, tackles tough issues - predicting future stars, staggeringly important life decisions, and the value of winning big; are all freshly handled and intelligently realized.

But it's not just the "numbers" approach that informs Billy's strategy. In the script, Billy reads the decision-making made during a trading session, and hires Peter Brand, a young, awkward advisor, away from his competition, when he realizes that Bren's nay about the deal was the deciding vote in a clever swap he's trying to pull. Peter Brand was the only fictional character: he's actually Paul DePodesta, now a VP with the Mets, who went to Harvard, not Yale, and is tall and slim.

It's Brand who has the fresh take Billy is looking for, computer modeling, but it's Billy who dances on pinheads, making seemingly "crazy" ill-advised hiring (and firing) choices, and brilliant trades for under-valued players whose tool-set will fill out a roster and build stats. I sat there thinking: would I have the guts and foresight to try something this novel? Would any of us? It's truly a depiction of the lone-wolf entrepreneur, a la Steve Jobs.

The film was a fitting bookend to Adam Sternbaugh's recent NYTimes Magazine article, "The Thrill of Defeat", (Oct. 23, 2011), as he writes about the heartbreak of the Boston Red Sox melt-down and other sorrows of the sports fan.

But the film, a quasi-docu-drama about a real-life person, deals with the dream-makers, not we vicarious, ultimate FANS. How do you straddle this gap between sport and life? Billy Beane's story tells us: be a romantic faithful lover, a Don Quixote, albeit smart, and play "guts ball" - make a commitment that is conscious, informed and for real, even though the questions about added and excluded value linger.