Michael Lewis is a veteran journalist who sticks almost exclusively to two topics: professional sports and business/economics. His 2003 book Moneyball details Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane’s struggles to apply the latter to the former. Ignoring decades’ worth of received wisdom about appraising baseball players, Beane swapped out the insights of crusty veterans for dispassionate number-crunching performed by nerds, trying to find new statistics and more reliable measurements for what to expect from a player.
The success of Beane’s theoretical tinkering is questionable—the A’s have never won a championship since his management began in 1998—but his impact in getting people to think differently about team sports is undeniable, and the methods he championed still controversial enough to instantly set off fans who despise the very idea of stats-based team-building: the release of director Bennett Miller's Moneyball film triggered, among other things, a contemptuous sports column about Paul De Podesta, Beane’s assistant in Oakland, whose short-lived stint as GM of the Los Angeles Dodgers can still drive sports columnists to sputtering rage.
There are a lot of contentious feelings and arguments attached to Moneyball’s ideas and arguments, none of which translate into the movie itself. Beane wasn’t coming out of nowhere; he was building on the work of (among others) Bill James, who argued that baseball statistics measured the wrong things and proposed some new formulas for determining a player’s worth. The book spends a considerable amount of time detailing both James’ evolving thinking and the sputtering fury he provoked in baseball traditionalists. Some of the film’s best scenes pit Beane (Brad Pitt) against a room of real baseball scouts playing themselves; their collective, dry, repetitive insistence on “fundamentals,” the importance of a hot girlfriend (an average-looking one indicates “low self-confidence”) and other “intangibles” is stopped dead by Beane’s insistence on relying solely on numbers and trying to stay emotionally detached. In business, this would make sense: for them, it’s irrational anathema.