Going into “Moneyball,” I had high expectations. Based on all the reviews, this Brad Pitt baseball movie was this year’s “The Social Network,” one of my favorite movies of last year. I mean, what about “Moneyball” wasn’t exciting - a baseball movie that had an amazing writing pedigree (“The Social Network’s” Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian, who wrote “Schindler’s List,” “American Gangster,” and “Mission: Impossible”). Hell, I even kinda like Brad Pitt. 

The movie was boring. Don’t let critics fool you (like Philip Martin of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette), this movie is only about baseball. Unlike “The Social Network,” where the real story was about loyalty, friendship, betrayal, there is nothing behind the scenes as Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill’s characters use computer analysises  to try to construct a winning team. There’s nothing happening under the surface. There isn’t a bigger quest (sure, Pitt’s Billy Beane, once a promising baseball star wants to redeem himself but all of his redemption is on the field, not in his personal life).

Unlike “The Social Network,” if you didn’t care about the subject, baseball, this move didn’t matter. All it really showed was how unfair baseball is and if any fans out there had any nostalgic left for this corporate-shill of a sport, it was wiped away before the movie was halfway over. Here is the lesson taken away from “Moneyball:” to compete with the deep pockets of big-market teams like The New York Yankees and the Boston Redsox, you must do away with human intuition, or scouting reports, or the “feel” of a player and go with the raw data of a player - his on-base percentage. You’re not buying a team, you’re not buying players, you’re buying data, at the lowest price. That’s why people go to baseball games -  to cheer on stats. That’s why kids aspire to become baseball players, so they can be judged solely on the numbers they produce for a computer. This movie killed any romance baseball had left (and it wasn’t much to begin with).

“Moneyball” didn’t possess a fraction of the wit or smarts of “The Social Network.” I wonder how much of Sorkin was in the script.  And with all the up-close shots and zooming in on computer screens, director Bennett Miller came off as a wanna-be David Lynch.

MLB should be embarrassed by this movie. It showed how unfair the game really is. Though I’m not a big fan of the NFL, I understand some of the football’s appeal - any team has a shot of going to the Superbowl. Look at the Green Bay Packers. By far the smallest market of any professional sport and they were able to beat The Pittsburg Steelers. When it comes to baseball, there’s a reason why the New York Yankees have more than 25 World Series wins.

And “Moneyball” thinks it proves it point that Beane’s strategy works because the Boston Red Soxs won the World Series using it. So a major-market team with a team salary of more than $139M wins the World Series proves the little guy can win? No, it means the Yankees and the Sox and the Dodgers will apply Beane’s strategy and construct the best team using those stats and continue to win.

The reason why movies like “Bull Durham” and “The Natural” are considered good movies is because baseball is backdrop, a metaphor for life. But “Moneyball” is a baseball move about how a team used numbers to try to win. It was a boring baseball movie about nothing but baseball.

Pitt and Hill were great on screen and there were some good laughs but I couldn’t wait for this movie to end and I hope I don’t have to sit through it again.

4 months ago · Notes