The Big Picture

• Moneyball portrays the real-life underdog story of the '02 Oakland A's using innovative player analysis.
• The film received critical acclaim and awards, but overlooked key players.
• Some real-life figures portrayed in Moneyball, like Peter Brand and Art Howe, felt misrepresented.

The best kinds of real-life sports stories are ones that seem like concepts by a Hollywood screenwriter. However, the beauty of sports movies is that they are genuine portrayals of human perseverance and remarkable athletic feats. At its best, no fictional dramatization can capture what's on the field or court. Films attempt to mimic the drama and passion of the most exhilarating sports triumphs. In Moneyball, arguably the signature baseball film of the last 15 years, the story of an underdog squad built upon a groundbreaking method of player analysis comes with baggage, as is the case with any story based on true events. For some baseball aficionados, the artistic liberties of Moneyball are too egregious to cheer for.

Aaron Sorkin's 'Moneyball' Is Not Your Traditional Sports Movie

It's hard to position a multi-million dollar organization as a plucky underdog, but relative to their imposing competition, the Oakland Athletics of Major League Baseball was a little engine that could in 2002. Moneyball tracks the 2002 season of the A's, who, after losing their star players in free agency to the major market teams in the American League, the New York Yankees (who defeated them in the 2001 playoffs) and the Boston Red Sox, are rudderless. In this untenable situation, general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) assembles a new squad on a tight budget by employing computer-generated analysis to acquire new players, ones disregarded by the traditional scouting system dominating baseball for nearly 100 years. Beane's maverick approach to player development is formulated by his assistant, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a Yale economics graduate who used empirical data to build a baseball team.

Moneyball, directed by Bennett Miller and based on the nonfiction book by Michael Lewis, is not a rudimentary sports movie. First and foremost, scenes depicting baseball are limited. In fact, Beane himself never watches the games in person. The film has a writing credit by Aaron Sorkin, which is no surprise, as its primary action consists of front-office executives sitting in rooms negotiating business transactions (similar to A Few Good Men). While the '02 Athletics won an impressive 103 games and rattled off 20 consecutive wins, the underdog story failed to achieve its capstone, as they lost in the AL Division Series to the Minnesota Twins.

To this day, the Athletics have not won a World Series since 1989, and Beane, once a highly-touted prospect coming out of high school, has never donned a championship ring on his finger. However, Beane's iconoclast method of roster construction and player development has permeated the big leagues, for better or worse. To the dismay of many avid baseball viewers, the day-to-day operations of a baseball squad are driven by advanced analytics that appear more like data from a NASA lab than what's on the back of a baseball card. As Moneyball's epilogue states, the Red Sox broke their torturous 86-year World Series drought in 2004 on the foundation of Beane's sabermetrics.

The Oscar-Nominated ‘Moneyball’ Was a Big Success

The story of the '02 Oakland A's is still nonetheless worthy of a thematically rich narrative feature film. Released in 2011, Moneyball was a box office hit, a critical darling, and received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. Brad Pitt gives arguably his finest performance as a dispirited idealist who adopts a seemingly impenetrable formula not to change the world, but to validate himself. The film also helped introduce Jonah Hill's dramatic chops, as both actors received Oscar nods. Lines from the film, including "he gets on base," and "how can you not be romantic about baseball?" have expanded beyond baseball fandom and into the cultural lexicon. Moneyball had everyone talking about On Base Percentage (OBP).

For well-informed and seasoned baseball fans, Moneyball may resonate as a simplistic interpretation of not just the historical record, but the sport entirely. The film is unfairly categorized with mawkish inspirational sports dramas such as Rudy, Remember the Titans, and Miracle. Because the A's failed to reach the World Series, the implications of this team as a triumphant success akin to the Miracle on Ice will seem fraught and disingenuous. Sports would be incomplete without the ancillary debates between fans and media talking heads. The validity of Moneyball's narrative was caught in the crossfire of contention over the sport's fundamentals. It's natural for one side to think that analytics are overrated and that they don't measure the human element of baseball, and the other side to contest that empirical data never lies, and arguing against its value is blind sentimentality.

Not Everyone Was Pleased With Their 'Moneyball' Portrayals

Bennett Miller's film took a handful of creative liberties that are sure to trouble fastidious baseball fanatics. Furthermore, many of the film's stretches were problematic for its subjects, including Jonah Hill's Peter Brand, who in real life was named Paul DePodesta, who requested to be characterized under a fictional name. Holding no ill-will towards Hill, DePodesta was displeased with the film's presentation of his appearance as a stereotypical bookish "nerd." As a Harvard student (not Yale like in the film), he played football and baseball, while his Moneyball likeness evokes the spirit of a computer geek who never touched a ball. For what it's worth, our visual perception of Jonah Hill does not signal a two-sport athlete. DePodesta expressed discomfort with the idea that has forever symbolized the concept of "Moneyball" in the public.

Being played by the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman should be the highest honor possible, but maybe not if you were a former professional athlete. In Moneyball, Hoffman, reuniting with Bennett Miller, who directed his Oscar-winning performance in Capote, plays Art Howe, the Athletics manager. The film depicts Howe as the ultimate antagonist of Beane's new formula. They butt heads over personnel decisions and lineup changes. Compared to Beane and Brand, Howe is pitted as a stodgy and stubborn relic of the past. The real-life Howe was offended by his characterization in Moneyball and expressed his frustration on the radio upon the film's release. Suspecting that Beane was responsible for his deemed character assassination, he expected an apology from the A's general manager if he ever encountered him. Moneyball, in both the book and the film adaptation, broadly portrayed the traditional scouts as unsophisticated rubes.

'Moneyball' Ignores Certain Real-Life Baseball Stars

The most egregious distortion of historical accuracy in Moneyball is the short-term impact that Billy Beane's Moneyball formula had on his baseball squad. In the film, the Athletics' principal players are ostensibly a band of misfit toys abandoned by scouts league-wide, notably injury-prone catcher-turned-first baseman Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), aging outfielder David Justice (Stephen Bishop), and the unorthodox relief pitcher, Chad Bradford (Casey Bond). This trio of unheralded players with unrecognized value satisfies the film's threads as an inspirational sports movie akin to The Mighty Ducks, but in reality, the success of the '02 Athletics was not so Hollywood-like.

The players ignored in Moneyball, including shortstop Miguel Tejada, third baseman Eric Chavez, and starting pitchers Barry Zito and Tim Hudson, were the real anchors behind the juggernaut squad, and their numbers back it up. These ballplayers were not only established talent prior to the '02 season, but they were drafted and developed through traditional means that Beane protested in the film. It is rare for one team to roster both the league MVP and Cy Young Award winner (the best pitcher) in the same season, but, among many triumphs, Tejeda and Zito of the A's won the AL MVP and the AL Cy Young in 2002, respectively. While a praise-worthy achievement, the success of these two players runs counterintuitive to Beane's strategy.

Holding historical inaccuracies against a film's artistic merit is unjustified. In the case of Moneyball, it uses a true story as a backdrop to tell the story of an alienated and frustrated visionary who vows to change the system out of sheer desperation. More than a baseball movie, Moneyball is a stirring character drama about employing professional autonomy against an unyielding institution. Everyone can sympathize with the dramatization of Billy Beane. Even amid failure, one can still find romanticism in their craft and profession.

Moneyball is available to watch on Netflix in the U.S.

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