Wow, just when I thought I knew a little something about baseball, history is revealed. Moneyball (2011) was one of the year’s highly acclaimed movies. We found it at the Academy Awards with a Best Motion Picture nomination, Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role nomination, Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role nomination, and three other Oscar nominations. It seems safe to say that prior to this movie, non-baseball fanatics had no clue about the legendary acts of Billy Beane, General Manager for the Oakland Athletics, and his acts of making baseball history, but thanks to Hollywood, the suave Brad Pitt and the willing to share Beane, a new populations now understands a little bit more about baseball and the Oakland A’s.
Beane offered to share his story for the screen and showed American’s that a lot of hard work can pay off! The idea that Beane and his newly hired Assistant General Manager, Peter Brand, contrive is to build a team based on hitting and on base percentage. However, Beane was working with a mere $38 million compared to the Yankees $120 million budget. One of my favorite things that the moneyball presenters talked about was the basic old world disorder-new world order difference. The old world elements from this film is that money is power, the idea that the more money you (team manager) had, the better players you could buy. In fact, the movie has a great scene showing us that’s exactly what the money was all about... to put players where you did and didn’t want them. The scene where Pitt tells one of the team’s players that the reason he is the highest paid is because the Yankees are paying part of his salary to make sure he stays off their team. The new world link that we see is that knowledge becomes power. As Brand and Beane construct new methods into finding good enough players using numbers and knowledge.
The connection that I had also made when watching the movie, and the group briefly mentioned, was the relationship between Beane and the players, and for that matter, the realization of most general managers and their relationship with the team’s players. Beane, in the movie, avoids all personal relationship with his players, and one of the players recognizes this as a Beane distancing himself so it would be easier on him if and when he needed to cut players. There was also the movie element which resembled the master vs. slave relationship. The manager is in total control of who plays for that team, and who doesn’t. The “slaves” (players) must work at be the exact product the master needs them to be in order to result in a winning team.
These are just a few examples on how we can link this recent motion picture to old world disorder and new world order. In retrospect I also saw this movie as very relatable to today’s culture and economy. Baseball has been a huge part of America for quite some time, and the whole idea behind Moneyball is that Beane is working with a limited amount of money but has to buy the best money can... in a sense it’s all about the money and how far it will get you. It’s interesting to see the contrast of what “America wants” and what Beane has to strategize to try and buy, and strategize he does!
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