(no subject)
A newspaper article recently made the point that there hadn't been a wide-released baseball movie since Fever Pitch in 2005. They spoke contemptuously of Jimmy Fallon being cast as a Boston Red Sox fan. I liked Fever Pitch, and would further like to mention that it hasn't been six years since a baseball movie came out. The Perfect Game, starring the kid from Wizards of Waverly Place, came out in 2010. Sugar, filmed in part in Davenport, Iowa, near where my friend Greg O'Neill lives, and featuring a player not unlike the ones he taught over the summer. And as for 2008, while it was not marketed as a baseball movie per se, Twilight actually prominently featured the pasttime as the favored sport of vampires.
But getting back to the point of the article, it claimed that Moneyball represented the comeback of the baseball movie after a long absence.
I think actually Sugar was ahead of the curb in shifting the nature of the baseball movie, by mixing up the order of finding success, defeat, and redemption. The story starts at the end of the 2001 major league season. Improbably, the Oakland A's had made it to the post-season in the wild card race, and pushed the New York Yankees to seven games. The team's general manager, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) makes his way across the bay to San Francisco to meet with the team's owner. He wants to change things up for 2002. He wants to get some real talent into the line-up. If they could make strides against a team with a nine figure payroll with the talent they had, think of what they might be capable of if they could use some logistics to stretch their 39,000,000 dollar budget.
On a trip to the Cleveland Indians organization, Billy Beane notices that the team's general manager will not authorize a trade of a particular player after consulting with a young 25 year old man in glasses with a paunch who stands non-descriptly in the corner. This man is Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), and he has quietly leveled with his general manager that the on-base percentage of the player they stood to receive would not guarantee the premium amount of bases for the season.
In perhaps one of the most enticing scenes of the film, Billy Beane confronts Peter head-on at his cubicle, demanding to know why he discouraged his general manager from accepting the trade for an A's player. In this scene, Peter sort of gets lost in Beane's gaze. I thought of the line in Superbad where Seth told Evan about how he'd looked in the eyes of one of Jules' boyfriends and "it was like hearing the Beatles for the first time." Same went here. I think you could say an instant mancrush was formed.
It's not a stretch to call Moneyball a bromance between Billy Beane and Peter Brand, and yes, Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill are not the first choice for a match-up I would imagine.
Billy Beane returns to Oakland with Peter Brand signed to his staff as assistant General Manager. The board of the A's are not pleased that this young economics major from Yale might be granted access to the very closed meetings of their board of directors. But Brand's presence is integral to Beane's success as a general manager.
Much as the United States turned to Navajo Indians to use code language to transmit radio signals during World War II to stymie the Germans, Billy Beane wants to use sabremetrics to compile a roster of Oakland A's players who would be formidable enough talentwise and discretionwise to accumulate an on-base percentage as a ball club that could legitimately compete with the Yankees and the other American League baseball outfits.
At first, Beane, along with Brand, are scoffed at by the long-standing members of the board, and the scouts who pride themselves in finding players with good batting averages to recruit to the organization. Happily, Beane is stubborn enough to face such men down, and uses his authority as general manager with bluster to hire and trade accordingly. Over Christmas, he makes a trip with first base coach Ron Washington (Brent Jennings) to the home of Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt) a catcher who has a decent on-base percentage but no contract for the upcoming season. While his wife crunches numbers at the dining room table and their daughter sleeps, Chris entertains the offer of Beane to have him play for the Oakland A's as a first baseman.
"Is it hard to learn to play first base?" asks Hatteberg.
"No, it's not that hard," Beane reassures, then gestures to Washington. "Tell him."
"It's incredibly hard," the first base coach deadpans, not missing a beat.
In the moment, this was high-stakes, high-tension for the third-base coach, the general manager, and the prospective first baseman. They were making an incredible financial gamble on a player who would be experienced in one position but was very green in the outfield spot they needed him for. However, watching it transpire from the seats of a movie theater, it is not hard to laugh hysterically at the conflicting agendas of Beane and Washington in their effort to settle upon a suitable first-base candidate.
Do the sabremetrics work right away? Of course not. The team falls into a rut, well below .500 through May and June, and Beane is questioned by everyone from the fans to the sportscasters to the board. Then there's Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the team's manager, who relentlessly disagrees with Beane's suggestions for players in the game's line-up. As general manager, technically Beane has the authority to call the shots. But Howe, who's contract has not yet been renewed for the upcoming year, starts to feel he has less and less to lose by going with his gut and putting in the players he feels are more rested, reliable and capable of getting hits.
Some interesting moments in the film include Beane asking Brand to deliver the news to a player that he has been traded to the Tigers. Brand is just a young guy who crunches numbers, and the last thing he wants to do is tell a player that he has to uproot from his residence and move to another city to play for their team. His entire social life he has to leave behind, and if he has a family, hopefully they're not too settled yet. Peter hates having to do this, and I was reminded of the scene in Up in the Air when Anna Kendrick had to deal the news via videoconferencing to an older man that his position was no longer available. The fact that Peter labors over the nicest way possible to say this conflicts with Billy Beane's personality completely.
"Would you rather get one shot in the head or five in the chest and bleed to death?" Beane asks Brand in a meeting before he is scheduled to deliver the news of the trade to the player.
"Are those my only options?" Peter asks.
After weeks of lopsided losses over wins, suddenly the A's get on track, and manage to win over twenty straight games in the regular season, and find themselves primed to enter the post-season. It all comes down to an eleven-eleven tie game, which had been an 11-0 lead the A's had let slip away. Scott Hatteberg steps up to the plate. It is his discipline, and his keen eye for the pitch, that will give him the advantage of getting on base over the bat-cracking A-Rods and Jeters of the Yankees outfit. While the film tries very hard to stay existentialist, whereby baseball is a business and a franchise that has to crunch numbers for productivity of its employees in order to decide who to retain, trade, put in for a series, or who to rest, the success of the A's, against all odds, causes the film to finally embrace the element of prevailing over adversity that has become the staple of so many great baseball movies in the past. And it does so beautifully, with a quiet score by Michael Danna, a screenplay by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, with the story by Stan Chervin, and based off of the book by Michael Lewis, the film is left with no choice but to dispense with its rational convictions in pursuit of depicting the game as a labor of love, as the circumstances it is portraying dictate such a mood.