Moneyball

The film is about baseball. Baseball is a game for two teams. One player throws the ball, and a player from the other team tries to hit it and run around four bases. When a player runs all the way round, his team gets one point — a "run". The team with more runs wins.

Billy Beane is the boss of a small club in Oakland, in California. His club has very little money. The big clubs, like the New York Yankees, have a lot of money — much more than Billy. In the winter, three of his best players go to rich clubs, because those clubs can pay them more. Billy has not much money to buy new players.

Billy talks to his old scouts — the men who watch young players and say who is good. They talk about how a player looks and how he walks. Billy thinks this is old and wrong. Then, in another club's office, he meets a quiet young man who studied economics at university. The young man has a new idea: do not buy famous players — buy players who get to first base a lot. Nobody counts this, so these players are cheap. Billy gives him a job.

Billy buys strange, cheap players. One player has a bad arm and cannot throw well. One player is old. One player throws the ball in a funny way, and other people laugh at him. But all of them get to first base very often.

Nobody is happy. The old scouts are angry, and Billy gives one of them the sack. The fans on the radio say Billy is destroying the club. And the manager — the man who chooses the players for each game — does not want to use Billy's new players. So Billy sells the other players. Now the manager has no choice.

At the start of the season, the team loses again and again. Billy is very nervous, and he never watches the games. He sits in his car, or he goes to the gym alone, and he listens to the radio. He is afraid he has made a very big mistake. We also learn about Billy when he was young: he was a great young player, but he was never a star.

Then everything changes. The team wins one game. Then another. Then another. In the end they win twenty games — one after the other, with no losses. This is a new record.

In game number twenty, Oakland are eleven points in front. It looks easy. But the other team scores again and again, and soon the two teams are the same. Then, at the very end, the player with the bad arm comes on and hits the ball out of the park. Oakland win! The fans are very happy.

But the film is honest. After the season, there are more games — the play-offs — and Oakland lose in the first round. They do not win the big prize. After this, a very rich club offers Billy a lot of money to work for them. He says no. He stays in Oakland, near his young daughter. At the end of the film he drives home and listens to a song from her.

The idea is not Billy's. It comes from a man called Bill James. In the 1970s he worked at night as a guard in a food factory in Kansas, and he wrote about baseball statistics. In 1977 he printed a small book of 68 pages and sold about 75 copies. In 1980 he made a new word for this work: sabermetrics. The name comes from SABR — the Society for American Baseball Research, a group of fans who love baseball numbers. It started in 1971.

His big idea was about one number. For a hundred years, clubs looked at how often a player hit the ball. But a player can also walk to first base: if the person throwing the ball throws badly four times, the player gets first base for free. The old number did not count this. The new number — on-base percentage — counts every time a player gets to first base. Players who did this a lot were not famous, so they were cheap. That was the secret.

The young man in the film is not a real person. The real assistant was Paul DePodesta, who studied economics at Harvard. He asked the film not to use his name, because he did not want somebody to play him on screen. So the film made a new character.

And here is the big problem. That Oakland team had three excellent players who threw the ball: Barry Zito, Mark Mulder and Tim Hudson. Zito won the prize for the best pitcher in his half of baseball that year. The team also had Miguel Tejada, who was voted the best player in the league. The club found all of them in the old way, with scouts — not with a computer. But the film almost never shows them. Also, Oakland did not win the World Series, the big prize. They lost in the first round. They have not won it since 1989. But the ideas won: other clubs copied them, and today football, basketball and many companies use numbers in the same way.