Moneyball Movie Gets Axed
Filming of a screen adaptation of Michael Lewis’ Moneyball has been axed by Columbia Studios the same week it was scheduled to go intro production. Studio execs reportedly got cold feet over repeated revisions of the screenplay, co-written by Steven Zaillian and Steven Soderbergh. The film was to star Brad Pitt.
Lewis’ Moneyball looks at Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane and his use of sabremetrics — objective analysis of baseball statistics — to judge free agents and prospects rather than traditional metrics which are subjective and, in some cases (e. g., win-loss records for pitchers, batting average which ignores the importance of walks in creating runs, etc.), entirely misleading. The book was written at a time during with Oakland had considerable success with young players like Adam Piatt, Johnny Damon, the Giambi brothers, and Miguel Tejada. Beane’s methods looked for guys like these before they hit their prime earning potential so that he could maximize talent and minimize payroll (Oakland shares a small market in the Bay Area with the SF Giants); then when the players are eligible for free agency, you let other teams over-pay them.
It’s important to note that for all of Beane’s successes in the early part of this decade, his teams never advanced to the ALCS or World Series. They lost against teams with higher payrolls. There’s a lot more to success in baseball than having an optimized budget.
It’s also fair to look at other factors contributing to the success of Oakland during this period, such as the number of players who have since been linked to steroids. The Giambis, Tejada, Piatt, and others have either come clean about their use of PEDs or were named in the Mitchell Report. Many people overlook the issue of power-hitting and argue that one of the reasons the A’s were so good for so long had at least as much to do with their pitching as their offense. The A’s had a dominant offense to match their good pitching. You don’t win unless you outscore your opponent. Ask another accused steroid user if pitching trumps offense: Roger Clemens probably should’ve had at least another Cy Young while in Houston if his W-L record had better reflected his sub-2.00 ERA than his own team’s lack of offense.
I’m not so sure this movie would’ve been too interesting. I think something based on the life of sabremetrics practitioner Bill James (who coined the term “sabremetrics”) might be more interesting; James languished in relative obscurity for years while “baseball people” ignored his ideas and analyses which he sold in annual editions of his Baseball Abstract. How many night-watch security guards at bean packing plants end up influencing baseball general managers like Beane or become advisors to MLB teams (James is such an advisor to the BoSox)?
Moneyball spends more time on Billy Beane than Bill James; presumably, this is because Beane is the All-American, the stud who didn’t pan out in the big leagues but was able to turn a low-salary team into a contender using unorthodox (by baseball standards) methods. With a central character like Billy Beane, you cast a Brad Pitt. While James’ role in Moneyball merits a lot more space than it got, Moneyball is still interesting reading. I’m kind of glad the movie is dead.
