Manohla Dargis, opens her New York Times
review of Bennett Miller’s
Moneyball by calling it “a movie about baseball in the
digital age.” The word “digital” can mean pertaining to fingers,
numbers, or electronic devices that operate by means of computer
code (that is, the numbers 0 and 1), and it is usually the last of
these that is intended when the adjective is used to modify the
word “age.” As computers do not figure particularly prominently in
the movie, however, Ms. Dargis appears to mean something a bit more
vague by the term, something like “the world we now live in which
is completely different from that of the pre-digital age.” If so,
she shows herself to be as susceptible to utopian romance as the
movie’s makers (including top scribe Aaron Sorkin) and its hero,
Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), who at one point in the film proclaims it
to be his ambition to transform the game of baseball — not, as it
happens, with computers necessarily, since the calculations behind
the magic of putting together a winning ball club can be done with
calculator, abacus, or pencil and paper, but with the analytical
powers of the human mind.
You know those old-fashioned baseball movies — or almost
any other old-fashioned movies — where the grizzled old-timer
shows up the young hot shot who thinks he knows everything? Well,
now the young hot shot who thinks he knows everything does
know everything, and thus he obligingly shows up and humiliates the
grizzled old-timer with his outmoded information systems. The
superior think-power of Moneyball was supplied to Michael
Lewis, the author of the book of the same title on which the film
is based, by a self-taught statistician called Bill James who, at
the time the book came out eight years ago, looked as if he really
might be revolutionizing the game. Most people think it hasn’t
quite panned out like that, but the dream dies hard. Ms. Dargis
writes that “Mr. Miller holds onto the romance of baseball that Mr.
James and others helped strip away,” but this is a mistake. Neither
Mr. Miller nor Mr. James are stripping away the romance of
baseball. They are substituting for it the romance of the
intellect.
No baseball player in this movie comes across as a hero,
but Billy and his fat, nerdy sidekick Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) do.
And they do so by putting Mr. James’s theories to work on behalf of
the Oakland Athletics — or “A’s” as they now insist on being
called — during the 2002 season. Even our sporting heroes are no
longer the guys on the field, who mostly appear here as oafs and
knuckleheads, even without any allusion on the part of the
film-makers to the doping that was apparently rife at the time in
the A’s locker room, as in so many others. No, it’s the guys who
reduced — or almost reduced or seemed for a time to have reduced
— baseball to a science and players to automatons by their sheer
intellectual candlepower. They’re the heroes, and it’s
because they can be represented, however fleetingly, as having at
last discovered, at least in one area of human endeavor, the Golden
Fleece, the El Dorado, the Prester John of our time: namely that
utopian system which, in the words of T.S. Eliot, is so perfect
that no one will have to be good.
Of course, the players brought on board by Messrs. Beane
and Brand are good, but they are good, as it were, by
necessity. So far as the movie is concerned, at least, there is no
virtue to them in their goodness because it is all there already in
their numerical curricula vitae as compiled by Peter Brand. And
numbers, as we all know, don’t lie. In place of the old-fashioned
kind of goodness, or greatness, that we admired in the ballplayers
of old, we now have something calling itself fairness, which has
something of the same resonance here that it has for President
Obama, for whom it means equality. Mr. Lewis’s Moneyball’s
subtitle was “The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” and the ghost of
this idea of fairness haunts the movie version as well. What he
meant, of course, was not that the game itself was unfair but that
it was unfair (in his view) for there to be rich teams and poor
teams — like the New York Yankees, who could afford to buy up all
the best players and so win year after year, and the lowly A’s who
might develop great players but would then routinely lose them to
richer teams as soon as they became free agents.
The movie begins with the departure of Jason Giambi,
Johnny Damon, and Jason Isringhausen from the A’s to richer teams
at the end of the 2001 season and implies that it was Mr. Beane’s
replacement of them with unregarded players identified as stealth
stars by the fictional Mr. Brand’s ingenious statistical methods
which was responsible for their success in 2002 — when they set an
American league record by winning 20 games in a row — and
subsequent seasons. There is no mention of the contribution to this
team of star pitchers Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and Barry Zito, all
of whom were in place before the Moneyball era. That the team has
not been so successful — in fact has not had a winning season —
since 2006 is also unmentioned, though this is thought by some to
be because now everybody in the league is playing
Moneyball.
But the movie doesn’t look so far ahead. Instead, it ends
with Mr. Beane’s turning down an offer to be general manager of the
Boston Red Sox, a rich team, which nevertheless went on to win two
World Series championships supposedly using his methods. The
suggestion is that he is somehow sticking to his principle of
“fairness” — or, rather, his discovery (as he supposes) of an
ingenious method of compensating for unfairness — by turning down
the sort of offer that his top players’ inability to turn down was
responsible for the invention in the first place. Whether or not
this is true to the facts of Mr. Beane’s career, the point is to
add power to the movie’s own lineup by idealizing the utopian quest
for fairness.
In real life, as we ought to know by now, this ideal of
fairness is a will-o’the’wisp, and neither baseball nor anything
else is capable of living up to it. Neither luck nor ability will
ever be equally distributed, but somehow we continue to enjoy the
contests of unequals — in part, perhaps, just because they are
unequal. At more than one point in the movie, someone says
semi-ironically “how can you not be romantic about baseball” and
there is a similar attempt to draw back just a bit when a
representative of the old school is allowed to put forward the view
that you don’t make a winning team “with a bunch of statistical
gimmicks; nobody reinvents this game” — as, indeed, the world of
baseball outside the movies would seem to confirm. But the utopian
quest for fairness, though as doomed as the A’s championship hopes
appear to be, likewise gains romance and emotional power for that
very reason. The movie could be compared to Tom Stoppard’s trilogy
of plays called The Coast of Utopia, as both treat their
egghead utopian projectors with infinite sympathy as romantic
heroes of their already-lost causes.
I once wrote a book (Media
Madness: The Corruption of Our Political
Culture) in which I attempted a very brief
catalogue of examples of that favorite media trope (you may
recognize it) that goes: “Everything you know about x is wrong.” It
ought to be unnecessary to add that the statement is never even
remotely true except of people who don’t know anything at all about
x, but it apparently continues to rope in the suckers as it
continues to be a media favorite. The promise of access to
privileged information, even about quite trivial things —
“Everything you thought you knew about grilling is wrong,” I seem
to remember one of them went — must be nearly as irresistible as
the promise of winning the lottery. Or the World Series. The
subtitle of Michael Lewis’s book ought not to have been “The Art of
Winning an Unfair Game,” but “Everything you know about
interpreting baseball statistics is wrong.” Mr. Lewis, inspired by
Bill James, looked at the game like a journalist in quest of a
scoop at least as much as he did like a baseball general manager in
quest of a winning season. The same thing is true of the movie,
which is to that extent a disappointment.
