Eventually, Fuson found himself back with the Oakland Athletics after leaving Texas to return. In their pursuit of a certain player, the movie makes us think that Beane and Washington turned up at his house on Christmas day. In reality, the general manager was desperate to bring Hatteberg, a castoff catcher, to their team, but they did not go so far as to dop by his house during the festive period. Some of the discrepancies between Moneyball and reality are on the surface, such as the fictional overweight analyst Peter Brand Jonah Hill , who nervously joins Billy Beane Brad Pitt at the Oakland Athletics after being spotted during a meeting.
In reality, according to NBC Sports , Peter Brand is a stand-in for Paul DePodesta, an athletic assistant GM who had started with the baseball club not as an analyst but as one of the scouts that Billy rejects in the film. While most moviegoers are comfortable with the idea that details and character traits in a film get nudged one way or another, sports journalist Allen Barra contends that there were core problems with Moneyball that made the movie misleading.
Here is why Moneyball got so much of the true story wrong. Their combination of money and analytical strength promises more World Series appearances in the s. Worse than that, many teams with lower local TV revenues and marginal rosters now use a stats-based strategy to lose on purpose for several seasons for a chance at gaining two or three years of winning. A team can tank its way to the top , but it can take several seasons and is not an exact science.
What is certain is that during the down years the team is often hard to watch. Take the Chicago White Sox. That team went into full tank mode two seasons ago, after losing not on purpose for several seasons, with another lost season in store for Even if the White Sox eventually win, their window will likely not be open long. And because of revenue sharing to small-market teams, tanking franchises can still make money by reducing payroll. What is to be done?
Major League Baseball has adopted only marginal changes. Delays between innings have been shaved by five seconds. A rule for stipulates that a pitcher must face at least three batters or finish the inning — dooming the one-out reliever. MLB is considering instituting a second pitch clock, which would speed up the game. But they also will increase rosters by a player, creating more room for one-inning relievers.
I think more drastic moves are needed to counter how stats have compounded boredom in baseball. MLB needs to discourage tanking, shorten the game and make it more exciting.
As I noted in my book, Clearing The Bases , "In the year , for the first time ever, not a single team in baseball history finished above. Simply put, in the average difference between the worst and best teams was 20 percentage points; ten points plus or minus is all that was needed to close the gap between the team with the best record in baseball, the San Francisco Giants at for a won-lost percentage of. In a bit of irony that Lewis did not notice, the team with the best record in was a small-market team, the Giants, who were right across the Bay from Oakland, and the two teams with the worst record were from huge markets, Philadelphia and Chicago.
By the way, the small-market Giants won the World Series last year. Competition looked uneven by the year because the Yankees, an organization shrewdly built on both developing players and buying free agents, had won four World Series from through But the Yankees had pretty much dominated baseball since the s.
The point is that by the year many more teams had a chance to make the playoffs, and, as Billy Beane himself was fond of saying, "The postseason is a crapshoot. But Moneyball doesn't just get the state of present-day baseball wrong; it also misrepresents the history of the sport.
Baseball didn't become a game of "moneyball" in —it has always been a game about, for, and dictated by money. Moneyball doesn't give you a picture of what baseball in general and the Oakland A's in particular were like before the game entered the era of free agency and before Billy Beane is said to have changed the game.
As I wrote in an article for the Wall Street Journal last week, "In the 26 seasons before Beane became general manager of the A's in , Oakland was the biggest winner in baseball, with six pennants and four World Series victories. The Yankees, by comparison, won five pennants and three World Series over that span.
Three of those Oakland pennants—, , and —came when the irascible Charles O. Finley was the A's owner. Finley had few resources but was an amazingly shrewd judge of talent; Marvin Miller, founder of the player's union, called Finley "absolutely the best judge of baseball talent I've ever seen.
Finley whipped the big boys with patience and smarts, beefing up his minor league affiliates at a time when the richer, arrogant Yankees allowed theirs to decay. It can be argued that Finley thrived before the era of free agency, which drove up salaries and made it more difficult for small-market owners to compete. The problem with that is that the A's had another three-year dynasty after the advent of free agency, from , in which they dominated the American League, going to the World Series for three straight seasons.
The point is that in baseball there have always been factors that mitigate domination by the richest teams. There's no denying that the Yankees, Phillies, and Red Sox, with the highest payrolls in baseball, have definite advantages.
But the Phillies, though they are the largest single-market team in baseball and don't share their territory with another major league team as do the Yankees with the Mets, the Cubs with the White Sox, and the Dodgers with the Angels were the worst team in either league until the last few years.
When Philadelphia won the World Series in , they were the last of the original 16 teams to win the championship. When they won in it was only for the second time in the franchise's history. Injuries, bad luck, front-office stupidity, sentimental weaknesses that result in signing older players to multi-year contracts, and just plain dumb luck have always been among the reasons why just pouring money into a major-league team doesn't automatically result winning a pennant.
And while baseball doesn't have a salary cap and a fair revenue-sharing program like the National Football League, contrary to Lewis, its free market has produced a fairer system in terms of giving most teams a chance to win than the other major sports.
However far back you want to take the comparison, from the first Super Bowl in to the present, or just from the start of the new millennium, baseball has had more different playoff teams and more different champions than professional football. The real problem with Moneyball , however, is not Lewis's failure to understand baseball history.
It's his failure to see what was going on right in front of his and Beane's eyes in They write that Moneyball. Bradford was indeed one of Billy Beane's quirkiest pitchers and one of his most unusual finds.
If you saw him pitch, you'd never forget him—his right-handed delivery was so sidearm that some called it "underarm. Few teams took Bradford seriously because of his unorthodox delivery, but he proved to be a pretty good relief pitcher with an ERA of 3.
Which is fine, except that Moneyball implies that Bradford played a crucial role in Oakland's success. In a typical season, Zito, Mulder and Hudson gave the team more than quality innings and roughly 50 wins, whereas Chad Bradford never won more than seven games and topped at 77 innings. What about saves? Bradford recorded hardly any because Oakland never trusted him to be their closer. In a book ostensibly written to explain a team's success, Michael Lewis treats three dominant pitchers as an afterthought and obsesses about a pretty good middle-reliever.
Alan and Sheldon Hirsch highlight an unfortunate truth about Moneyball , namely that what does not fit Lewis's narrative—that Billy Beane's revolutionary use of baseball statistics changed the game—tends to be left out entirely.
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