Moneyball is a great book and a great story. This frightfully dumbed-down movie version is okay at best. I didn’t hate the film, I suppose, but I do think it is very sad that no one could think of a better way to bring the book to the big screen.

Here’s the problem in a nut-shell. They needed to write a lot of dialog to make this story work, and they obviously didn’t want to do that. So instead they completely distort the story to turn it into a semi-farce, implying that Beane is pulling this whole scheme out of his ass on a whim, and that everyone he works with is completely against him and considers him totally insane, and even though his team winds up winning a lot of games the movie leaves it somewhat ambiguous whether or not Beane’s “crazy shit” was at all responsible.

But this ruins everything wonderful about the book, and it was so unnecessary. The point of the book is that baseball has always suffered from institutional ridgity of thought, rooted in historical prejudices. Starting in the early 80’s, people outside of baseball started putting baseball on a firm footing mathematically, discovering many fallacies that were needlessly dominating the thinking of baseball scouts and executives, and they offered this information to the baseball community (repeatedly) but baseball turned a deaf ear to them.

So instead they released this information to the general public, the mathematical footing of the game subsequently broadened and deepened significantly, and soon there were a good number of non-baseball folks who were much more knowledgebale about how the game really works then the people running the game. That’s how people like Paul DePodesta (played as a differently named character by Jonah Hill) came to be floating around, to be discovered by Beane. They didn’t just fall out of the sky. All this shit was on pretty solid ground by the time Beane (in part because of his peculiar personal experience playing the game) recognized it all and systematically enacted baseball’s first team development program making use of all this knowledge.

Now, isn’t that a much more interesting movie than the Hollywood farce they served up? Let’s consider concretely how exactly this ruins the movie.They leave out Beane’s experience with Lenny Dykstra, the one critical narrative element from his past, which was at least sub-consciously the genesis of Beane’s whole idea (namely, that short, ugly, ignored players that were obsessed with and skilled at certain key elements of the game might make the best players.) They leave out the baseball draft, one of the best chapters in the book, because as they recast the story it makes no sense for Beane to be drafting all these misfits so confidently. They miss out on all the great scenes of how Beane had to fool or trick other GMs into trading with him because they were all totally spooked that he was going to pick their pockets as he had already done so many times before – hard to have this in the film if he’s pulling it all out of his ass. They miss out on how the coaching staff was for the most part with him, not opposed to him, and thus you never see the fabulous story of how the first base coach, through single-minded enthusiasm, actually cajoles that guy Hatteberg into becoming a decent defensive first baseman. You miss out on how Beane would play the timing of the season to pick-up decent players cheap right before the trade deadline, this being the reason that the A’s were always lousy in the first part of the season (the film makes it look like his scheme is “failing” in the early season, when in fact it is basically what is expected from past seasons.) There’s a lot more they miss out on, too – the book is packed with great narrative stuff!

Hell, you don’t even get to enjoy the simplest mathematics of the story – why base-stealing is bad, why bunting is bad, why walking is good and why it was thought to be bad or at least neutral in the past, what numbers they looked at to find undervalued pitchers, and in general the whole idea of looking at team outcomes over an entire season to discover what is really making a difference and what isn’t. All this stuff is pretty easy to explain (I successfully explained it in plain English to my wife in about 5 minutes, who then immediately wanted to read the book) but you do have to write dialog to make it happen.

Instead of taking the time to tell this wonderful and fascinating story correctly, however, they fill their screen time with the following: many cringe-inducing scenes between Beane and his daughter (not part of the book at all,) scenes of Beane driving around in his pickup truck, many excruciatingly slow, slow-motion shots of people striking out and dropping fly balls, lame “bonding” scenes between Pitt and Jonah Hill, tons of really atrocious and boring flashbacks that could have been summarized in 3 minutes of well-written dialog, and last but not least the revolting “believe in yourself, Billy!” ending between Pitt and Hill, where you find out why the filmmakers cut out the terrific Jeremy Brown story earlier in the film: so they could waste him as “comic relief” in this scene! Cut out all this shit, and you basically would have had time to include most the great stuff I mentioned above. Why are filmmakers so damn lazy!?

As for performances, Brad Pitt was pretty decent as Beane, because he  looks a lot like him, is good at playing a hothead, and is great at doing scenes on the phone.  I wanted to be open-minded about Jonah Hill’s presence in this film, but at the end of the day he is just a boring, nondescript little blob that contributes nothing to any film he is in. Watching him acting in roles that could have gone to other people is like taking a placebo when you know it’s a placebo – it doesn’t work. The only interesting thing about Jonah Hill is the question: why in God’s name is he starting to get all these roles? Who decided that he was a hot quantity?! Good Lord!

Moneyball: They squandered a great story and took the (very) easy way out. It’s a shame.