![]() And we really only meet one player, the rest are just names thrown in the air. As in all cases, they win some and they lose some. This isn't about the team and how many games they're going to win. For a movie about people trying to change the game of baseball, it's only fitting that they are changing the sports genre. Oh well, only one lesson for Hollywood at a time, and I still liked the movie. In fact, it cost Sony Pictures more money to make this movie than it cost the Oakland A's to field their entire team for a season. It's a movie about doing more with less, so I think we're just supposed to ignore the irony that they needed an excessively high budget to make it. ![]() Since the game of baseball isn't changing any time soon and players will always just be elements that can help win games and make more money, why not view them as numbers rather than as people with ugly girlfriends? Like Peter Brand, I like numbers. A lot of people took offense to Beane's approach of degrading players down to the sum total of their on-base percentage and runs-in potential. He only knows their stats and their salary. He doesn't know if they stand funny or if they swing ugly. He has no experience and he doesn't know these players. But then Beane meets Yale-educated, economics-, mathematics-, and computer-whiz, baseball fan, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill). One guy is no good because he frequents strip clubs too often, another guy is no good because his girlfriend is ugly, and on down the list they go. The humour of "Moneyball" starts in the off-season when the team can't afford to keep their top players and Beane and his experienced scouts start tossing around some free agent ideas. It's 2001 and Oakland has just lost to the New York Yankees in the playoffs, not surprising, seeing as their payroll was 76 Million dollars less. ![]() Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the GM of the Oakland As, seems to take that even further, treating people as if they are only numbers, and yet there was something refreshing and humanistic about the whole thing. It's callousness at its highest when general managers trade away people as if they're objects with little regard for them or their family. Major League Baseball is not just a game of money, but in "Moneyball" it's a game of numbers versus a game of people. It has long been said that professional sports are more a game of politics than an actual game.
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