On this day fifteen years ago, Moneyball released in theaters in the United States. Starring Brad Pitt as Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, the movie was an adaptation of Michael Lewis’s 2003 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, telling the story of the 2002 Athletics as they bucked traditional baseball wisdom in an attempt to build a winning ballclub despite losing three of their biggest stars in free agency: Johnny Damon, Jason Isringhausen, and, most notably, Jason Giambi.
Within baseball circles, the book made an immediate splash, and while it would be unfair to say that it kickstarted the advanced stats race — baseball people have always been statistical nerds, and even the modern conversations had its origins in the work of Bill James and Craig R. Wright, dating back to the 1980s — it certainly ratcheted up the conversation. Many front offices began to hire full-time sabermetrics staffs, looking to find “undervalued” players much like those Beane built his team around. Meanwhile, traditional scouts began to push back against the book’s narrative and analysis, with multiple articles and books penned attempting to refute Lewis’s thesis that traditional stats and scouting methods were outdated relics of a bygone era.
Outside of the circles of baseball fanatics, however, the book…I hesitate to say that a New York Times bestseller truly fell flat, but it certainly lacked popular appeal to truly cross over into the mainstream. It is, after all, a public-facing work of scholarship: an academic book published by an expert for those within the discipline, but which is written in such a way that it is accessible to the non-expert. In other words, it’s the type of book that would be equally at home in the footnote of a doctoral dissertation and on the shelves of Barnes and Noble. Even the most widely read of these books very rarely reaches pop culture status.
Everything changed with the release of the film adaptation in 2011. As tends to happen when quasi-academic books get adapted for the big screen, the movie made major changes from the source material — and, in this case, from reality. Almost completely absent from the story is the three-headed monster of Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and 2002 Cy Young Barry Zito, as well as star third baseman Eric Chavez and 2002 MVP Miguel Tejada (though contemporary Royce Clayton amusingly cameoed as Tejada). Manager Art Howe, a partner of Beane in the sabermetrics experiment, appears as the champion of traditional scouting, and David Justice complained about his egocentric portrayal just two years ago.
Despite these flaws, however, the movie became a major success both critically and financially. More importantly, though, it has remained in the cultural zeitgeist, both within and outside the baseball world. Brad Pitt’s “How can you not be romantic about baseball?” has become a cliche quoted whenever something wonderful — or wonderfully stupid — occurs in a baseball game. Jonah Hill’s monologue as Paul DePodesta stand-in Peter Brand advocating for the A’s to sign Chad Bradford has become a meme format that has escaped containment and become somewhat mainstream: “Billy, this is __. He does ___. His only defect is ___.”
The same has occurred, to a lesser extent, with “He gets on base” and “Re-create him in the aggregate.” And I certainly have used the “It’s not hard”/“It’s incredibly hard” first base exchange with my students over the years, although frankly, that might just be my love of first base.
When Moneyball came out in theaters, I was just starting my sophomore year of high school. Now, I am a teacher with six years under my belt, and I have taught students who were born after the movie was released. An entire generation of baseball fans has grown up in a post-Moneyball world: for them, sabermetrics/analytics have been an integral part of the sport, not a debate between the “jocks” and the “nerds;” the debates instead revolve around what kinds of data to use in a given circumstance. The book changed how front offices operated, the movie brought those changes to the public — and ensured that baseball be at the forefront of new technologies and analytics within the world of sports.
