Moneyball

October 2001, and the Oakland Athletics have just gone out of the play-offs to the New York Yankees. Baseball, if you've never watched it: nine players a side, a pitcher throwing, a batter trying to hit the ball and run round four bases, and a full circuit is a run — most runs wins. What the sport does not have is a spending limit, and Oakland's entire wage bill is a fraction of New York's. Billy Beane, the man who builds the team, is sick of hearing that this is simply how it is.

Then it gets considerably worse. Over one winter, Oakland lose their three best men to richer clubs who can pay them several times what Oakland can. Beane sits in a room with his scouts — experienced older men who judge players with their eyes, and who talk about a swing, a jaw, a girlfriend — and realises the whole conversation is obsolete. They are trying to replace stars. He tells them the club will never be able to.

Travelling to another club to trade, Beane notices a young economics graduate in the corner whose single quiet sentence stops the room. He hires him on the spot. The young man — called Peter Brand in the film — has an argument that sounds absurd: clubs think they are buying players, but what they should be buying is runs, and runs come from getting men on base. By that metric, dozens of unwanted, ordinary-looking players are wildly undervalued, and they are cheap because nobody else is counting.

Beane overhauls the club around the idea. He signs the rejected and the written-off: a catcher whose damaged elbow means he can no longer throw properly, an ageing outfielder well past his best years, a pitcher with an odd, low, almost underarm action that scouts find embarrassing to watch. Each one is bought for a fraction of what a fashionable player would cost. Each one, on Brand's numbers, reaches base more often than his price suggests.

Nobody is pleased. The head scout tells Beane he is destroying the club and is sacked for it. The press and the radio phone-ins are merciless. Worst of all, the manager who actually picks the team on match days refuses to use these players and quietly sets out the side he prefers instead — so Beane, ruthless now, trades away the alternatives until there is nobody left to pick but his own men.

And at first it does not work. Oakland lose, and keep losing, and the argument that Beane has staked his career on looks like an expensive fantasy. He is too superstitious to watch a game in person; he drives around the car park listening to the radio, or works out in an empty gym, while the season slides away from him. In among all this, in short scenes, we learn why he cares so much: as a teenager he was the great prospect who turned down a university place for a professional contract, and never came close to being the player everyone had promised he would be.

Then the season turns. The unwanted team starts winning, and does not stop: game after game after game, until Oakland are one victory away from a record that has stood since the 1940s. On that night they lead by eleven runs and the stadium is delirious — and then, inning by inning, the entire lead disappears until the score is level. Beane, who never watches, drives to the ground. In the last inning the catcher with the ruined elbow comes off the bench and hits the ball out of the park. Twenty wins in a row.

It is the high point of the film, and the film is honest about what comes next. In the play-offs, over a short series, Oakland go out in the first round. All of it — the argument, the sackings, the streak — and they are still at home while somebody else plays for the title. Brand shows Beane footage of an overweight minor-league player so afraid of being caught out that he never realises he has just hit a home run, and tells him the same thing has happened here: you won, and you can't see it.

Afterwards, the richest club in the sport offers Beane an enormous salary to come and do it for them. He thinks about it seriously, and turns it down; he stays in Oakland, where his young daughter is. The last thing we see is a man driving, listening to a song she recorded for him, and not yet knowing that within a couple of years the club he refused will have won the title it had been chasing for most of a century — using his ideas.

The thinking is not Beane's invention. It belongs largely to Bill James, who in the 1970s was working night shifts as a security guard at a pork-and-beans cannery in Kansas and writing about baseball in the quiet hours. In 1977 he self-published a 68-page pamphlet, the first Baseball Abstract, and sold about 75 copies through a small advertisement in a trade paper. He kept going, annually, for years. In 1980 he coined the word sabermetrics — named after SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research, an organisation of statistically-minded fans founded in 1971.

His most consequential argument concerned a single number. The sport had judged batters for a century on batting average: hits divided by attempts. But a batter can also reach base by being walked — if the pitcher throws four balls outside the legal zone, the batter simply walks to first base. Batting average ignores that entirely. On-base percentage counts it: how often a batter reaches base at all, by any means. Since runs are scored by men who are on base, on-base percentage predicted scoring considerably better — and, crucially, patient players who walked a lot were unglamorous, so clubs paid them a fraction of what they were worth. That was the undervalued asset.

Start with the man on screen. Oakland's real assistant general manager from 1999 was Paul DePodesta, a Harvard economics graduate. He asked for his name and likeness not to be used, saying he could never get comfortable with somebody portraying him to the world and that he had concerns about accuracy. So Peter Brand is a composite — Jonah Hill's character is not a portrait of any one person.

Now the omission that baseball people have never forgiven. That 2002 team had three outstanding starting pitchers: Barry Zito, who went 23–5 with an earned-run average of 2.75 and won the American League's Cy Young Award as best pitcher; Mark Mulder (19–7); and Tim Hudson (15–9, 2.98). It also had a shortstop, Miguel Tejada, who hit .308 with 34 home runs and was voted the league's Most Valuable Player. None of these four was a statistical bargain plucked from the scrapheap — they were found by exactly the traditional scouting the film mocks, and they are all but invisible on screen. A team with the best pitcher and the most valuable player in the league is not quite the underdog the film needs it to be. Oakland's manager, Art Howe, also objected publicly to the way he was portrayed as an obstacle.

And the ending is honest in one respect that people often forget: Oakland lost the 2002 play-off series to the Minnesota Twins, three games to two. They have not won the World Series since 1989, and Beane never won one. What did happen is that the ideas escaped. Boston hired Bill James as an adviser in 2003 and won the World Series in 2004, its first since 1918; Beane turned down a reported $12.5 million offer to run that club. Today every serious sport has an analytics department, and Beane himself has moved into European football — advising the Dutch club AZ Alkmaar from 2015 and joining a group that bought Barnsley in 2017. The argument won everywhere except on the field it started on.