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| Brad Pitt as Oakland A's General Manager Billy Beane |
The camera gives us a silent shot of the vast empty concrete walkways leading to stadium seating. And another shot of the darkened, homely-looking player locker room. This is no big-budget operation, we see right away. Then finally, a shot of the lower deck of the empty night-time stadium where Billy Beane, the A’s General Manager played by Brad Pitt, is sitting pensively in the dark (Why isn’t he at the game? one thinks). Intermittently he is tuning and then tuning out of raspy snippets of the game, and then once only long enough to hear the Yankees’ triumphant “New York, New York” come over the radio when he chucks the thing.
This is not a story of baseball. It’s a story of going against the tide, being true to yourself, and the amazing lifelong journey that can turn professional failure into personal redemption if you care enough to pay attention and learn from life.
Billy Beane was the high school star baseball player who all the scouts said would be the next big thing. He gave up a full scholarship to Stanford to be drafted in the second round to the New York Mets, but then stumbled through professional baseball for the next several years with a .219 batting average before asking for a mercy release by the Oakland A’s and put on the payroll as a talent scout instead.
In his new position in the front office, he began challenging the way professional baseball thinks about talent—like they had thought of him—convinced that the industry’s status quo of relying on scouts observations and instincts wasn’t working. He became the first GM to construct an entire team on a statistical approach that overlooked some of the things scouts become distracted by (form, personality) and instead focused solely on outcomes (on-base percentage).
The result was a rag-tag team of unconventional personalities and strange styles that no one thought would win, but that still holds the all-time record for consecutive wins in baseball (20). Beane changed the way baseball does business, and became the topic of Michael Lewis’s 2003 book “Moneyball”—which has had a profound impact not just on baseball but on business. The movie, written by Steven Zaillian (American Gangster) and Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) and directed by Bennett Miller (Capote) stands entirely on its own.
Billy Beane was the high school star baseball player who all the scouts said would be the next big thing. He gave up a full scholarship to Stanford to be drafted in the second round to the New York Mets, but then stumbled through professional baseball for the next several years with a .219 batting average before asking for a mercy release by the Oakland A’s and put on the payroll as a talent scout instead.
In his new position in the front office, he began challenging the way professional baseball thinks about talent—like they had thought of him—convinced that the industry’s status quo of relying on scouts observations and instincts wasn’t working. He became the first GM to construct an entire team on a statistical approach that overlooked some of the things scouts become distracted by (form, personality) and instead focused solely on outcomes (on-base percentage).
The result was a rag-tag team of unconventional personalities and strange styles that no one thought would win, but that still holds the all-time record for consecutive wins in baseball (20). Beane changed the way baseball does business, and became the topic of Michael Lewis’s 2003 book “Moneyball”—which has had a profound impact not just on baseball but on business. The movie, written by Steven Zaillian (American Gangster) and Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) and directed by Bennett Miller (Capote) stands entirely on its own.
The screenwriting itself is a work of art—and hilarious!—from the scouts’ draft-pick conversations (“His girlfriend is like a 6 at most man, I’m telling you he lacks confidence”) to the conversations with the players (David Justice: “You’re paying me seven mil to be here, so yea I think I’m a little special,” Billy Beane: “No, we’re paying you 3.5, the Yankees are paying you the other 3.5. That’s how little they think of you, they’re paying to play against you”) --but the real masterpiece of this movie is Billy Beane himself, masterfully portrayed by Brad Pitt.
There are three things that were most inspirational to me about Billy Beane. First, just how much he wants to win. We can see that former dual baseball-football star who has the same thirst to win. He never gives up, never surrenders the dream, it’s what drives him and keeps him awake even after he’s won.
Do I have something like that in my life?
Second, he’s got the courage to see through the crap, the hype, the excess in his industry, and go against it. Change. He doesn’t have such a big ego as to not see the truth. I have to wonder, if we had more people like Billy Beane on Wall Street, would we be in the state we are in today?
And lastly, Billy Beane knew the difference between pursuing his dream and selling out. He has said that the decision to sign with the Mets instead of going to Stanford is “the only decision I will ever make in my life about money”—and he proves it in the most amazing act at the end of the movie.
Would I be able to do the same?
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