REVIEW: Moneyball
Geeks come in all shapes, sizes, and flavors. Among the earliest might be Henry James, who developed the box score for baseball, which evolved under Bill James into the field of Sabermetrics. An entire generation of people scoured box scores and then followed James, who dug deeper and came up with entire categories Major League Baseball had never considered. After all, to them, the Save and the Hold were still newfangled concepts in the 1980s.
In 2001, though, those stats and their analysis broke through to the professional ranks. After losing the World Series to the Yankees, in a true David and Goliath matchup, the Oakland Athletics were about to lose first baseman Jason Giambi, outfielder Johnny Damon, and pitcher Jason Isringhausen to free agency, and there just weren’t the financial resources to match what other Big Market teams were willing to pay. General Manager Billy Beane, a young but open-minded executive, lost out on a trade with Cleveland but met a Yale economics graduate named Peter Brand, who had theories about player value that ignored the handful of stats MLB typically used. Intrigued, Beane hired Brand, and together, they built a stronger A’s for 2002, and after convincing old-school manager Art Howe to try it, they found success.
Business writer Michael Lewis covered this transformation in the best-selling book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, which became the hit film Moneyball in 2011, and has just arrived on 4K disc from Sony Home Entertainment.
Director Bennett Miller (Capote) faced the challenge of presenting statistics in a compelling way to keep audiences riveted in their seats. It helped that he had Steven Zaillian’s help, who wrote the original script for Steven Soderbergh. When he left the project in 2009, Miller was hired, and he had Aaron Sorkin revise the script so that the two had clearly delineated personalities and matching dialogue. Miller was fortunate to assemble a stellar cast, led by Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as this triumvirate of executives. The tension comes from Brand convincing Beane, then executing the plan until they hit the stone wall of Howe, chipping away at him, until finally the plan is executed to smashing success. They are three very different personalities, each with vastly different experiences, and they find common ground thanks to the singular goal of winning.
Anyone who knows baseball knows this was a turning point in analytics, and suddenly, one team after another hired their version of Peter Brand, including Bill James himself, which lends importance to this story, since it worked outside expectations and delivered, and could be replicated.
The film comes with 4K Digital HD and a Digital Code. The 2160 transfer is very good, though not as sharp as one might hope, given the quality of the 1080 edition from 2013. The video is supported with an excellent DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio mix, ported over from the Blu-ray, so you can enjoy the game without leaving your home.
This 15th anniversary edition eschews major new supplemental features but uses the ones from the original 2013 Blu-ray release:
Deleted Scenes (3 clips, 12:05); Brad Loses It (3:11); Billy Beane: Re-Inventing the Game (16:02); Drafting the Team (20:51); Moneyball: Playing the Game (19:28) Adapting Moneyball (16:33); Theatrical Trailer (new to the collection, 2:33)
