Phillyball
Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Oakland Athletics’ manager Art Howe in Bennett Miller‘s Moneyball (Columbia, 9.23.11). It’s the story Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), general manager of the Oakland Athletics, and his attempt to make the A’s competitive based on a “modernized, analytical, sabermetric approach…in 2000, 2001 and 2002, the A’s won 91, 102 and 103 games respectively and made the American League playoffs in each season. But they didn’t win a playoff series, and Howe and Beane grew estranged.”
He looks pretty perfect there.
Frankly, this seems like a pretty boring subject for a movie. But I thought that was the case when I heard about The Social Network and the filmmakers made that movie work.
I always like Hoffman, but he looks nothing like the older, lanky Howe. I don’t get the casting, but it’s Hoffman, so I DO get the casting.
I suppose in Soderbergh’s version, Howe was probably going to play himself, though I’m not sure why, since I understand the whole moneyball thing makes Howe look like an idiot and a tactical failure. Which he was. Fuck Art Howe.
Also, that “winning a lot of games” thing is misleading, since I do believe the Billy Beane-constructed teams were not structurally sound and NEVER made it out of the first round of the playoffs for VERY good reasons, with the sabremetric approach largely abandoned by the current Oakland front office.
So, again, the story is, wild GM and math guy come up with new ways to value baseball statistics (by far the nerdiest of all sports statistics) in order to consistently field a third or fourth place team? Someone illuminate me on how someone like Bennett Miller can craft this narrative into something compelling?
wake me up when there’s a Theo Epstein movie starring Armie Hammer.
Gabe, sabremetrics only got the team so far, but running into the Yankees every year, with their infinite and reckless spending, will surely kill a team, no matter how high the OPS and OBS numbers were for them.
Today, every team (with the exception of the Royals) uses some combination of sabremetrics and observational scouting. It’s pretty much necessary for 30 of 32 teams (the Yankees and Red Sox being the exceptions).
It’s how the Rays stacked their minor league system and provided 4 years of great baseball in Tampa. It’s how the Rangers turned the franchise around and are heading toward greener pastures. It’s how the Angels, for a number of years, dominated the AL West. It’s why the Giants just won the World Series (fuck them).
Me personally, I can’t wait for this film because the subject fascinates me to no end, and I do need to be educated and enlightened further on the use of sabremetrics analysis in Major League Baseball.
Postseason baseball is 80% a crapshoot.
Perhaps that’s why they cast Jonah Hill. It doesn’t matter if the team never makes it past the 1st round so long as they make people laugh and everyone looks happy.
Whoah boy.
I’ve long thought that physicality in roles based on true-life figures, so long as they’re obscure, isn’t all that important if the actor portraying them can unearth the essential truth of their nature.
And Hoffman is one of those rare talents whom I’d normally entrust with any challenge set to him…
But… The real Art Howe is so unlike anything Hoffman’s ever done or attempted; if this were simply the Art Howe life story then this would be bizarre and totally wrong casting of the highest order. For the baseball-averse cinephiles out there, I’d say the real Howe persona could probably be described as something akin to Luke Wilson channelling Robert Duvall as lensed by Terrence Malick.
I’m guessing they’ve made the decision that Howe the real-life character is superfluous to the story they want to tell, and have invented a wholly new persona with which to embody a key player to achieve their vision.
This is karmic retribution against me; I’ve so often loathed persnickety know-it-all dorks who belittle fine performances because they don’t line up with expectations based off of obscure historical knowledge. I have become the enemy. Egads.
Sabremetrics are only part of the game, but they can help determine the extent of the physical skills of a player. However, nothing can replace a true baseball man, who can look at a player and get a sense of him in the field. I grew up watching Whitey Herzog build strong teams with nothing more than his eye and instinct.
As bill weber said above, all of those stats mean nothing once you get into the playoffs. In the playoffs you live partially off of luck and partially off of momentum.
It’s a great book, I’m not sure how its a movie.
Production had a close-call false start. Budget was gutted, and then this version was green light. Anyone know the differences between the two version?
Other than my 10-year-old self’s fascination with Rollie Fingers and Rickey Henderson, I wish I had a little more to add on the subject of the Oakland A’s or this statistical stuff, but I kinda clocked out of baseball around age 18…
That said, BENNETT MILLER:
Can I get an AMEN that his “Capote” is pretty much the ULTIMATE excellent, year-end, Oscar-season HIGH QUALITY MOVIE that we all like, loved, and awarded 3.5, maybe even 4 stars to in late 2005– at the time it was a MIND-BLOWING #2 OR #3 on my year-end best list– and have never, ever, never, ever, NEVER watched again, WILL NEVER watch again, have little remaining affection for, and even though SURE it’s good and great, we don’t really remember much about it except Hoffman nancing a little and Collins Jr in his cell and that blunt hanging at the end, but when all is said and done, we’ll watch Brokeback Mountain or War of the Worlds or just about any other major movie from that year for the dozenth time before we ever think about buying a CAPOTE SPECIAL EDITION BLU RAY?
That’s NOTHING against the movie, but it’s a decent reminder that the ultimate TEST OF TIME is rewatchability, and this guy’s one big movie would seem to inch him closer to that Stephen Daldry zone than that Coen, Fincher, Soderbergh, Mann, Scott, Scorsese realm of guys whose movies YOU MIGHT EVER WANT TO SEE A SECOND TIME, EVER.
I’m bored with baseball. Think I’ll watch a movie instead.
It’s going to be some task trying to sell this movie. Good luck marketing department.
@Trekkie: the Giants just didn’t win the WS because of sabremetrics, by all sabremetrical (if that’s even a word) accounts they should have gotten wiped the FUCK out by the Phillies in the NLCS. It was more pure luck, drive, and all those other intangibles (and those other things R. DeRousse alludes to).
@Lex: that’s pretty funny (and dead-on) about Capote. I’ve been kind of following production on this because I’m a pretty avid fan of the sport, so my first thought when I saw Miller was directing this was, “wow, does Bennett Miller even care about baseball?” Second thought, mere seconds later: “wait…do I even care about Bennett Miller?”
Um, Ray, Whitey Herzog relied on a lot more than instinct. He was a big numbers guy, as was Earl Weaver, which was one of the things that rankled me about MB: Beane didn’t do anything that hadn’t been done by smart people for decades. Why are they making this movie again?
And to whoever said the only two teams that don’t need statistical evaluation are the Yankees and Red Sox should know there is no franchise that uses numbers better than Boston (who has to spend to keep up with their big spending neighbor). Oh, and Tampa Bay had four good years because picking at the top of the draft for a decade finally paid off. It’s what they do now that will determine their mettle.
Oh please about Boston. They spend more than Yankees do.
No, they don’t. Not even close, but don’t let facts and stuff get in your way.
@JapAdapters- you must not know Whitey Herzog at all. A numbers guy?? Whitey traded away all of the stars of the 1980 Cardinals for light hitting guys with terrible numbers and produced a world series win in 1982. Nobody in love with stats would make those moves. Whitey also made moves for people like John Tudor simply based on a hunch that the .500 lefty might do well at Busch.
Whitey managed baseball like he does his fishing: with a combination of experience and hunches. Fortunately for him that worked more often than not.
He looks like Don Zimmer
Yankees spend way more than the Sox. Not to mention the billion plus they spent on the new ballpark – which is nothing considering they spend that every four years on team sallary
He built the Cardinals specifically for Busch Stadium, like he built his Royals teams of the 70s for Kaufman Stadium. Had he taken the Red Sox job in the early 90s, like he was supposed to, you would have seen wildly different players than he brought to the Cardinals.
Read his book, Ray. He wasn’t a folksy ‘I judge by what I see’ guy, he was a shrewd, sophisticated baseball man.
When did I say he wasn’t a shrewd and intelligent baseball man? I totally agree about his ability to build teams to circumstances; he may have been one of the best at it. But Whitey was no sabremetrician.
Read the book, Ray. You’re wrong.
Sabremetics, especially as practiced by Beane and the A’s in the early 2000s, wasn’t merely about statistics. They couldn’t afford to compete using traditional methods of evaluating players, so they had to find what skillsets were undervalued at the time and go for those players. As it turns out, what was undervalued back then was on-base percentage and OPS. Beane went after scrubs and lightly-valued players that could be gotten cheaply, but had strong on-base and OPS numbers and produced a team that won 95+ games and their division multiple times in a row at a fraction of the budget of the other big-market teams. In fact, he was so successful that OPS and on-base percentage are highly valued now, so ironically he’s had to abandon those statistics and search for the next undervalued stat — his great success meant he no longer could continue his strategy.
But putting all that aside, MONEYBALL is a great and entertaining book and, if done right, should make a very entertaining movie.
And the cat was out of the bag a lot sooner than it would have been because he let someone WRITE A BOOK about his advantage.
The point of MB wasn’t sabremetrics, it was market deficiencies, and Beane’s ego seemed to lead him to believe he could find another. The problem being there is no stat nearly as important to winning baseball games as OBP, which will never be undervalued again, so the As have basically stunk since that time. Why are they making this movie again?
And, Ray, I apologize for sounding so arrogant. If you read Herzog’s book he clearly has a strong grasp on sebremetrics, even if he doesn’t call it that. He says things like ‘If I can get this guy Coleman, and his world class speed, on base 34 percent of the time, he can be a devastating offensive player’ which is what he did. He brought Darrell Porter from KC to StL because he … got on base! He played Ozzie Smith even when he was an offensive black hole because he prevented runs at an other worldly rate (and it’s amazing what statistics have revealed about Ozzie’s defensive value). Stuff like that.
He was ahead of his time because he, like Earl Weaver, played the percentages not his hunches. That’s essentially sabermetrics. It’s called You’re Missing a Great Game, great book and if you grew up watching him you’ll really dig it.
Spring training starts in seven weeks.
Beane was a crafty and effective executive without a doubt, but any team that runs Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and Barry Zito out there at the height of their powers will win a ton of games. Those 3 were completely dominant at that point in time.
“Spring training starts in seven weeks.”
jesus god
The inspiring true story of how one special team went from cellar-dweller to also-ran.
Geez, you don’t even have to win anymore to get a movie made about you.
Amen, Lex.
@Lex -
99% agree w/ your take on CAPOTE. Well said.
HOWEVER, any time I see that rival Toby Jones “Infamous” film playing on cable, “Capote” temporarily feels like the greatest film of the decade when contrasted with such dreck.
Also, momentum doesn’t mean shit in the playoffs, and that’s a provable fact.
The interesting story here isn’t about the A’s. It’s about how they introduced sabremetrics to a wider baseball audience, becoming VASTLY more influential among both baseball front offices and fans than their own record ever reflected.
Without Oakland, there’s no 2004 Red Sox. There’s no current-day Rays. There’s a new generation of stats guys and talent scouts that now recognize that the old way of measuring performance, while familiar and comfortable, simply wasn’t all that accurate when trying to measure the relative worth of VERY closely related players.
The story of Beane and Bill James is the story of an entirely new way of looking at something that hundreds of millions of people thought they had known inside and out for a hundred years.
This story is fascinating not because of Beane, but for what Beane (and Bill James) hath wrought. He started a revolution that he never got to enjoy.
It’s DEFINITELY a Social Network-caliber story, but with sports.
(BTW, those “gut” guys would do well to read this great SF Weekly piece, reposted on Deadspin, about how Joe Morgan saw the sabremetricians… you all sound like him.
http://deadspin.com/5685456/my-uncomfortable-encounter-with-an-angry-joe-morgan)
Of course, I admit that I make my case far more persuasively if I don’t succumb to the annoying tick of misspelling “sabermetrics”… grrr, I need a drink.
Forget sabermetrics, what about steroids? At one time or another, Beane and the A’s had three of the central figures in baseball’s steroid era: Canseco, McGwire and Giambi.
I guess you guys don’t know that Aaron Sorkin wrote this movie. As evidenced by The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin does not write dull material.
@ JapAdapters – Here’s an interesting line from a review of the book you’re referring to:
“The most compelling read, however, is how Whitey destroys the concept of statistics for statistical purposes. Winning baseball and certain good statistical performance from key players, notably home runs, do not always correlate — a theme that runs through this book over and over again.”
Perhaps we’re confusing what the concept of sabremetrics entails. Sabremetrics tries to use statistics on all areas of performance to determine a player’s worth at a position or in general. It tries to rate those players based against what is considered “average” for that skill or position.
Whitey never did that. Yes, he played percentages (who can forget Whitey moving Worrell into right field in order to bring in a lefty reliever to face a lefty before bringing Worrell back in to pitch?), but Whitey didn’t really assess players based on cold numbers. If he did, he would never have dealt for the players he did in the early eighties. Ozzie Smith was hitting .200 when he was brought to St. Louis. Who would play Dane Iorg? Darrell Porter instead of Ted Simmons?? Sabremetrics would KILL the players Herzog chose … but they worked from a baseball perspective.
I just wrote a lengthy article about one of the greatest teams ever constructed, the 1985 St. Louis Cardinals. You might get a kick out of some of the video highlights if you’re a baseball fan.
http://redbirdrants.com/2010/12/27/the-greatest-teams-1985/
The great thing about sabremetrics is that is completely destroys the old statistics.
For example, in the past, fielding errors actually meant something. There used to be a day when the less errors you make, the better defensively you are. Today, that statistic is complete bullshit. Derek Jeter always has a high fielding percentage because he makes every routine play. However, his range factor is awful. He’ll seldom make the difficult play. He simply can’t reach the ball when it is hit between SS/3rd and up the middle; therefore, his fielding percentage is high because those don’t count against him.
Look at Elvis Andrus. His range factor is incredibly high and can reach the balls that Jeter only dreams of today. He has more chances to make plays, and also, he has more chances to make errors. He may make a mistake on plays he’s reaching for, but he records many more outs than these “better fielders” record.
Same goes for pitching. ERA and W/L used to matter. They don’t anymore. Any respectable GM can tell you that. Wins and losses for a pitcher rely far too much on the contributions of everybody else. Felix Hernandez was a much better pitcher this year than his wins and losses record showed (same with Zack Greinke last year). Better statistical analysis, such as WHIP (hits + walks+ intentional passes per inning per 9 innings), gives a better idea of the kind of pitcher a guy is. A guy may be able to ride a low ERA for a while, but if he has a high WHIP and keeps giving up baserunners, that statistic will correct itself.
These newer, more advanced forms of analysis is helping teams that have payrolls under $100 million per year compete with the Yankees/Red Sox of the world.
Crazynine said it best: the story here really isn’t how Billy Beane turned around the A’s. It’s far more about the new forms of scouting and analysis he widely introduced to Major League Baseball. And honestly, this to me is an intriguing topic.
@ Trekkie Monster – Frankly, I was annoyed that Jeter won the Gold Glove when he clearly wasn’t the best shortstop in the league just because sabremetrics seems to support him. It’s a double-edged sword.
My beloved Cardinals briefly flirted with using the Moneyball approach, but abandoned it because they don’t really have the people in place to properly use the technique. Sabremetrics can work quite well, as long as you have some instinctual scouts and coaches who can read between the lines of those stats and see the player.
Yeah, the fielding metrics are garbage. They don’t take into account the defensive shifts, dimensions of specific ballparks, game situations, etc.
The best test for a good fielder is still the good ol’ fashioned eyeball test. Yeah, Andrus gets to a lot of balls, and his range impresses me, but he still makes too many mistakes.
But maybe you weren’t implying that he deserved the Gold Glove, either…
Ray,
I completely disagree with you. In fact, I see that exerpt and it explains EXACTLY what sabermetrics has exposed, not the opposite.
Whitey knew Jack Clark’s value wasn’t merely a function o his power but rather said power mixed with his batting eye. In other words, Whitey knew that just because a guy filled up the HR column that didn’t make him good. He traded for Darrell Porter because he knew a guy who walked 100 times was more valuable than a guy who hit .300 but didn’t get on base otherwise. He (and everyone else) knew that Ozzie Smith was the best defensive SS of all time, certainly by watching him, but the statistical evaluations have borne that out and that the name of the game is run prevention. These are all tenants of sabermetrics, more so (IMO) than the definition you’ve provided. VORP is a sabermetric stat, but it doesn’t define the movement.
Regardless, you should read the book. Whitey’s greatest contributions to the game weren’t as manager but rather as general manager. He made shrewd moves based on a philosophy that statistics have proven to be right, unlike many of his peers, who accepted baseball “truths” that have been proven, beyond a doubt, to be absolutely wrong.
I wasn’t implying that Andrus should have won the Golden Glove. I was implying that Jeter should not have.
I used that example because, while Andrus has a lesser fielding percentage and is more prone to mistakes, he records more outs during the course of a season because his range and ability (all measurable, though as you said, not flawless) give him more opportunities.
The main point of this comparison was to reject the importance of FP.
Don’t tell Joe Morgan.
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