How ‘Moneyball’ Became The Most Enduring Baseball Movie Of The 21st Century

Baseball has long been known as America’s pastime, but the sport didn’t reach that lofty position simply due to people’s love of either playing or watching the sport. Hollywood played a vital role in cementing the myth and grandeur of the game in the American firmament, going all the way back to when Gary Cooper’s turn as the New York Yankees legend Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees earned him a Best Actor Oscar in 1943, and continued through the decades with widely acknowledged classics like The Natural, Bull Durham, and A League of Their Own. The upcoming book Baseball: The Movie is the first definitive history of this film genre, one that was born in 1915 and remains artistically and culturally vital more than a century later. Writer, critic, and Decider contributor Noah Gittell sheds light on well-known classics and overlooked gems, exploring how baseball cinema creates a stage upon which the American ideal is born, performed, and repeatedly redefined.

Decider is excited to share this exclusive excerpt from Baseball: The Movie with our readers. The book will be available in bookstores everywhere beginning on May 14, 2024, but you can pre-order the book today from retailers like Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.

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“The first one through the door always gets bloodied.” Those are the words of John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox, in Moneyball, talking about Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), who revolutionized baseball in much the same way Howard Dean and Joe Trippi, his national campaign manager, transformed politics: by utilizing the power of data to gain an advantage over better-funded opposition. 

Beane never got to the World Series, and Dean never got to White House, but imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The Red Sox adopted Beane’s moneyball approach, added money to it, and won a World Series in 2004. Trippi, a lifelong baseball fan, explains the connection between Moneyball and the Dean campaign. “We had to find a completely different way to compete, and without the normal resources. To dive into the digital space and data, and use that to outcompete the bigger, better guys. When we started, we only had $98,000, but we were able to play with the big boys because we were ahead of them on digital,” he says. “If John Kerry was the Yankees, we were the A’s.”

Based on the 2003 best-seller by Michael Lewis, Moneyball came at a fallow time for the baseball movie. The boom of the ’80s and ’90s had run its course, and while the genre still produced an occasional box-office hit, most baseball films of this era failed to make an impact with the public. Summer Catch was a disaster. Mr. 3000 is good, but it never found an audience. The less said about Ed, in which Matt LeBlanc from Friends plays baseball with a chimpanzee—check that, a man in a chimpanzee costume—the better. 

Fever Pitch at least deserves credit for its novelty: It’s the first baseball film ever to focus entirely on the fans, at least not ones who end up playing on the team or running it. Although it wasn’t a hit, Fever Pitch signaled a change in the baseball film, which began looking beyond its typical underdogs—aging catchers, brainless pitchers, infirm superstars, children with special powers—in search of even more marginalized heroes. This expansion could be viewed as part of a broader trend toward authenticity in Hollywood filmmaking, caused by a confluence of factors including the advent of digital filmmaking, which favored hyper-realistic action over sepia-tinted nostalgia; anxiety about the implications of computer-generated imagery that could replace humans on screen; and even the tragic events of 9/11, which for a time rendered Hollywood sentimentalism irrelevant. The romantic comedy was dead. Action films had little use for quippy stars like Stallone and Schwarzenegger, and instead favored stoic heroes and shaky-cam action sequences, like those that made Jason Bourne a global sensation.

These developments left the baseball movies in limbo. How does a genre built on nostalgia survive in an era of anti-romanticism? The answer was Moneyball, a film that balances bold, new ideas on old, familiar tropes. Moneyball chronicles a revolution in baseball front office strategy that mirrored similar changes happening in politics, finance, surveillance, and pretty much every other industry. But it’s not a revolutionary film. It employs a tried-and-true narrative in which a team of misfits come together under an unorthodox leader, learn to play to their potential, get close to the championship but lose, and find a happy ending in its “wait til next year” denouement. It’s the same template the baseball film used since The Bad News Bears, except the adult-in-charge is in much better physical shape.

Even before the film was made, Billy Beane saw himself as a character in a baseball movie. When asked in 1999 to present to the Commissioner’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Baseball Economics, an internal MLB effort to solve the growing issue of revenue parity, Beane opened his presentation with a slide that described the plot of Major League, and compared the A’s, who were also reliant on cheap players, to the Indians of that film. Even to these learned men and women, the best way to describe the A’s economic conundrum was to cite a baseball film. Moneyball was a movie waiting to happen.

As perpetual underdogs since their heyday in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the story of the A’s may have lent itself to a conventional baseball movie, but, for a while, there was a chance for Moneyball to be genuinely groundbreaking. Before Aaron Sorkin came on to write the script and Bennett Miller, recently minted as an Oscar-friendly director with 2005’s Capote, was chosen to direct, Moneyball was set to be made by Steven Soderbergh. An Oscar winner for 2000’s Traffic, Soderbergh was also known for a fierce independent streak. In between studio projects like Erin Brockovich and Ocean’s Eleven, he made strange, arty films with titles like Schizopolis, Full Frontal, and Bubble. When Soderbergh was hired to make Moneyball, his bosses likely thought they were getting the former, but the script Soderbergh turned in was more avant-garde. Labeled a “semi-documentary approach” by The Hollywood Reporter, it was said to have reflected the innovative spirit of its front-office subjects, mixing real-life major leaguers in with the actors, featuring ballplayers speaking directly to camera in testimonials, and, according to one account, sporting “an abundance of baseball details that executives feared risked alienating viewers.” As the rewrites got weirder and weirder, the suits got nervous. In the end, the film was scrapped five days before shooting was set to begin, and producers began searching for a new creative team to tackle the project.

With time to work, Sorkin, Miller, and Steven Zaillian (another Oscar winner who wrote an early draft and was retained through the film’s many permutations) rewrote Moneyball to be more conventional, introducing colorful characters, keeping the data-driven discussions to a minimum, and concluding with a classic “big game.” They condensed the story of how Beane changed baseball into a single season, creating a satisfying narrative of a rogue employee fighting back against an oppressive system. Moneyball, as it came out, is not a story about data or even really about baseball. The new rules that Beane propagated—no bunting, no stealing, only swing at your pitch, run up the pitch count, and get deep into the other team’s bullpen—only show up on a few white boards and in well-edited montages of Beane and his right-hand man Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) communicating their approach to the A’s players. Instead, it rests on Hollywood’s most reliable tropes: underdogs, competition, and a David vs. Goliath narrative, with David played by one of the most charismatic movie stars of his generation.

Brad Pitt, who stuck with the project through every permutation, deserves much of the credit for the film’s place in the canon. Baseball movies are the most successful when they have a major star at the center, and those who know Billy Beane marvel at how the actor subtly transformed into the legendary executive. It’s a formula for a baseball film that could easily be replicated, except for two things. Stars of Pitt’s caliber are in short supply these days, and the revolution fomented by Beane and the A’s still rules the game—and our world. A new story has yet to be written, which means Moneyball is still the most enduring baseball film of the century.

Baseball: The Movie (Independent Publishers Group) will be available in bookstores everywhere starting on May 14, 2024. You can pre-order the book today from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, or your favorite retailer.

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Noah Gittell (@noahgittell) is a culture critic from Connecticut who loves alliteration. His work can be found at The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Ringer, Washington City Paper, LA Review of Books, and others. His new book, Baseball: The Movie, is currently available for pre-order, and will be released in May 2024.