FILM: Moneyball

Moneyball, a value-added approach to baseball.

The Oakland A’s have a player payroll dwarfed by the big name teams - the monster Yankees, the benighted Red Sox, but a loyal following.  How did Billy Beane, a player who failed his predictions of stardom, build a fighting team?  By using player stats and creating predictive computer software models to identify under-valued players who could be hired and molded to “beat the stats” and become a winning team. It’s called “sabermetric theory” in the baseball biz.

I remember hearing the same concept when I researched Janus Funds in the 1980’s to begin investing:  their research was so deep and effective they could identify under-valued companies whose worth would increase SOONER rather than later - this was all and good, but we all know what happened to them. 

Billy Beane, as depicted by Aaron Sorkin’s smart script, tackles tough issues - predicting future stars, staggeringly important life decisions, and the value of winning big; are all freshly handled and intelligently realized. 

But it’s not just the “numbers” approach that informs Billy’s strategy.  In the script, Billy reads the decision-making made during a trading session, and hires Peter Brand, a young, awkward advisor, away from his competition, when he realizes that Bren’s nay about the deal was the deciding vote in a clever swap he’s trying to pull. Peter Brand was the only fictional character:  he’s actually Paul DePodesta, now a VP with the Mets, who went to Harvard, not Yale, and is tall and slim.  

 It’s Brand who has the fresh take Billy is looking for, computer modeling, but it’s Billy who dances on pinheads, making seemingly “crazy” ill-advised hiring (and firing) choices, and brilliant trades for under-valued players whose tool-set will fill out a roster and build stats.  I sat there thinking:  would I have the guts and foresight to try something this novel?  Would any of us? It’s truly a depiction of the lone-wolf entrepreneur, a la Steve Jobs.

The film was a fitting bookend to Adam Sternbaugh’s recent NYTimes Magazine article, “The Thrill of Defeat”, (Oct. 23, 2011),  as he writes about the heartbreak of the Boston Red Sox melt-down and other sorrows of the sports fan:  

“And, as with other recent, more consequential once-in-a-lifetime cataclysms, you find yourself not just feeling disappointed or even despairing; you also feel cosmically duped. You question the validity not just of your choices but also of the entire system. And you wonder why on earth you invested such a huge amount of emotional capital in an enterprise that could explode so spectacularly in your face. How could you have left yourself so vulnerable?

But I’m here to tell you that the crushed fans of the Sox and Braves, as well as victims of epic sports collapses everywhere, should embrace, not regret, their ordeal. The epic collapse is to be treasured, even more so than the improbable victory. It’s more rare, and therefore more precious. And it reaffirms the essence of why we root for a team in the first place...

There is... demonstrable value to being a sports fan. It allows you to feel real emotional investment in something that has no actual real-world consequences. In any other contest (presidential campaigns, for example), the outcome can be exhilarating or dispiriting to its followers and, by the way, when we wake up the next day, the course of history has been changed. As for fictional stories, you can certainly get swept up in them, but their outcomes don’t hinge on the unpredictability of real life. Sports stories, on the other hand, are never guaranteed to end happily. In fact, as we’ve seen, some end in a highly unsatisfying way. As a fan, you will feel actual joy or actual pain — this is precisely what non-sports-fans usually ridicule about being a sports fan — in relation to events that really don’t affect your life at all.

In this context, consider the epic collapse. It’s crushing, maddening, unfathomable — and yet it means nothing. Like a shooting-gallery target or bickering sitcom family, your team will spring up again same time next year, essentially unharmed. (Give or take a jettisoned manager or scapegoated G.M.) And so will you...it’s heartbreak with training wheels....leaving you...with some lingering life lesson or other: about resilience, or the eternal promise of renewal”.

But the film, a quasi-docu-drama about a real-life person, deals with the dream-makers, not we vicarious, ultimate FANS.    How do you straddle this gap between sport and life?  Billy Beane’s story tells us: be a romantic faithful lover, a Don Quixote, albeit smart, and play “guts ball” -  make a commitment that is conscious, informed and for real, even though the questions about added and excluded value linger.