Moneyball(2011)

Plot Summary

• Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) is upset by his team's loss to the New York Yankees in the 2001 postseason. With the impending departure of star players Johnny Damon, Jason Giambi, and Jason Isringhausen to free agency, Beane attempts to devise a strategy for assembling a competitive team for 2002 but struggles to overcome Oakland's limited player payroll. During a visit to the Cleveland Indians, Beane meets Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a young Yale economics graduate with radical ideas about how to assess players' value. Beane tests Brand's theory by asking whether he would have drafted him (out of high school), Beane having been a Major League player before becoming general manager. Though scouts considered Beane a phenomenal player, his career in the Major Leagues was disappointing. After some prodding, Brand admits that he would not have drafted him until the ninth round and that Beane should probably have accepted a scholarship to Stanford instead. Sensing opportunity, Beane hires Brand as the Athletics' assistant general manager.The team's scouts are first dismissive of and then hostile towards Brand's non-traditional saber-metric approach to scouting players, most notably Grady Fuson (Ken Medlock) - who is fired by Beane after insulting their approach and takes to the radio airwaves and doubts the team's future. Rather than relying on the scouts' experience and intuition, Brand selects players based almost exclusively on their on base percentage (OBP). By finding players with a high OBP but with characteristics that lead scouts to dismiss them, Brand assembles a team of undervalued players with far more potential than the A's hamstrung finances would otherwise allow.Despite vehement objections from the scouts, Beane supports Brand's theory and hires the players he selected, such as unorthodox submarine pitcher Chad Bradford (Casey Bond), an aged first base David (Who was released from his contract by New York Mets because of his age), a washed-up hitter Scott Hattesburg & many other like him, purely based on their On Base Percentage. Following the free agent signings, Beane finds that he also faces opposition from Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the Athletics' manager. With tensions already high between them because of a contract dispute, Howe disregards Beane and Brand's strategy and plays the team in a traditional style despite their unsuitability.Beane eventually trades away the lone traditional first baseman, Carlos Peña, to force Howe to use the new recruits. Beane also has a chat to all the players along with Brand & explains how their on-field choices affects their OBPs and eventually the outcome of the games. Beane also has a chat with a few remaining egos in the camp & gives them a reality check based on mutual respect and understanding. David steps up as a team mentor and starts taking a leadership role in helping the junior members of the team with their fears and weaknesses.Early in the season, the Athletics fare poorly, leading critics within and outside the team to dismiss the new method as a dismal failure. Beane convinces the owner to stay the course, and eventually the team's record begins to improve. Ultimately, the Athletics win 20 consecutive games, setting the American League record. Their streak is capped with a victory over the Kansas City Royals. Like many baseball players, Beane is superstitious and avoids attending or sometimes even following games as they are in progress. His young daughter implores him to go to the A's final game against the Royals, where Oakland is already leading 11-0 after the third inning and appears set to advance their winning streak to a record-breaking 20. Beane arrives in the fourth inning, only to watch the team go to pieces and eventually allow the Royals to even the score 11-11. Finally, the A's do win, on a walk-off home run by one of Brand's picks, Scott Hatteberg.Then, despite all their success in the second half of the season, the A's lose in the first round of the postseason, this time to the Minnesota Twins. Miguel Tejada would go on to win the 2002 American League MVP and Barry Zito the 2002 American League Cy Young Award (although neither accomplishment is noted in the film). Beane is disappointed but satisfied at having demonstrated the value of his and Brand's methods. Beane is later approached by the owner of the Boston Red Sox, who realizes that the saber-metric model is the future of baseball and offers to hire Beane as the general manager of the Red Sox.In closing, the film notes that Beane passed up the opportunity to become the general manager of the Boston Red Sox, despite an offer of a $12.5 million salary, which would have made him the highest-paid general manager in sports history. He returns to Oakland to continue managing the Athletics. Meanwhile, two years after adopting the saber-metric model, the Boston Red Sox win their first World Series since 1918.

Storyline

• Oakland A's GM Billy Beane is handicapped with the lowest salary constraint in baseball. If he ever wants to win the World Series, Billy must find a competitive advantage. Billy is about to turn baseball on its ear when he uses statistical data to analyze and place value on the players he picks for the team. — Douglas Young (the-movie-guy) In 2001, General Manager Billy Beane's Oakland A's lose to the Yankees in the playoffs then lose three stars to free agency. How can Beane field a competitive team when the A's player salaries total less than a third of the rich teams'? To the consternation of his scouts, Beane hires and listens to Peter Brand, a recent Yale grad who evaluates players using Bill James' statistical approach. Beane assembles a team of no names who, on paper, can get on base and score runs. Then, Beane's manager, Art Howe, won't use the players as Beane wants. Can Beane circumvent Howe, win games, make it to the 2002 Series, and stand baseball's hidebound conventions on their heads? — <jhailey@hotmail.com> The Oakland A's end their 2001 season with a loss in the AL fifth game of a best of five elimination series, still an admirable accomplishment seeing as the A's are considered a poor team with a payroll one-third of that of a rich team like the New York Yankees. During the off season, they lose three of their star players through free agency, most problematic being first baseman Jason Giambi . Without more money which he doesn't get from owner Stephen Schott, the A's GM, Billy Beane , knows that they will never win the World Series as richer teams will always be able to pilfer their best players - ones they have been able to nurture - with more lucrative contracts. Billy knows they have to think differently about how to replace the three, looking at what they require in combination rather than looking at the three as individuals, which is different than the way scouts have looked at players over the sport's history. In a meeting with Cleveland Indians management about players, Billy meets Peter Brand, a quiet Yale Economics graduate, who works for the Indians doing player analysis. Upon questioning Peter later in private, Billy realizes that purely academic Peter has much the same thought process as he does. Billy hires him as the A's Assistant GM after receiving what he considers the correct answer to Billy's question on his own checkered past as a first round 1979 draft pick which led to notoriety as a failure as a player. But once on the payroll, Peter convinces Billy to look at the entire dugout, and acquire undervalued players for what they can do in order for the team to win. As an example, they acquire former catcher Scott Hatteberg , whose career is seen as being over by all other teams due to an elbow injury that doesn't allow him to throw. Although not a hitter, they acquire him for his ability to "get on base" in whatever way required (usually by walks), and plan to teach him how to play first base, a generally non-throwing position. These moves don't sit well with the A's scouting team and sports analysts. Problematic is that the A's Manager, Art Howe , who also doesn't agree with or understand the strategy, refuses to listen to Billy about how best to manage the team as assembled. Billy knows that his and Peter's jobs are on the line if they don't produce, which he realizes means nothing less than winning the World Series. But more important to Billy is to show the world of baseball that his way is the right way. — Huggo Bennett Miller's adaptation of Michael Lewis' non-fiction best seller Moneyball stars Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, a one-time phenom who flamed out in the big leagues and now works as the GM for the Oakland Athletics, a franchise that's about to lose their three best players to free agency. Because the team isn't in a financial position to spend as much as perennial favorites like the Yankees and the Red Sox, Beane realizes he needs to radically change how he evaluates what players can bring to the squad. After he meets Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), an Ivy League economics major working as an executive assistant for scouting on another team, Beane realizes he's found the man who understands how to subvert the system of assessing players that's been in place for nearly a century. However, as the duo begin to acquire players that seem too old, injured, or inept to play major-league baseball, they face stiff resistance from both the A's longtime scouts and the team's manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who outright refuses to allow Beane's more-nontraditional acquisitions to play. When Billy gets fired for his actions, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) becomes GM and becomes the greatest GM ever. 1 more All