‘Moneyball’ Trailer With Brad Pitt Debuts
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiAHlZVgXjk[/youtube]
The first trailer for Moneyball, that movie about baseball statistics starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, was just released by Yahoo! Movies today and I’m going to call it a standing double in baseball terms. It’s a good, clean trailer that sets up the movie well but doesn’t really make convince me there’s going to be a whole lot of drama to it. Also taking away from the drama is the fact that Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s never really won anything… The man started a baseball revolution, but he was pretty quickly surpassed by every other team and general manager who bought into his line of thought.
Moneyball screenwriter Aaron Sorkin did well with The Social Network though, so it definitely has the potential to be good. We’ll all see when Moneyball opens on September 23rd.
I think it’s unfair to charge that not having a trophy undermines the drama of Beane’s story. If anything, it makes it more fascinating because it doesn’t as yet have a conventional, satisfying conclusion. Yet, there’s no mistaking the impact that Beane has had on the game. The Boston Red Sox owe their success of the last decade directly to adopting sabremetrics.
Moneyball may prove the most topical film of 2011. Its theme is how an outdated way of running an entire industry was challenged by someone with a vision for how to do things not just differently, but better. As we continue to languish economically, the story so far has been told of all the laborers out of work and the investors who screwed the pooch. What we’re not hearing much of is how there’s a dearth of visionary leadership in the private sector.
The modern corporate leadership appears to be concerned exclusively with their personal bonuses, but do not see beyond their own gilt-edged walls. They accept mediocrity–even encourage it at times–so long as they are taken care of personally. Beane defied that mindset in baseball at a time when really the only other owner with a passion for winning was George Steinbrenner. Rather than find the cheapest players he could, Beane wanted the most talented players he could afford. Even though it hasn’t led to a championship in Oakland, that philosophy has spread.
What Beane did was prove that an organization didn’t have to spend obscene sums of cash to be competitive. One of the key philosophies of Moneyball is that baseball owners kept overlooking talented players through poor scouting. Who among us in 2011 doesn’t believe that we could excel if just given the opportunity that keeps eluding us?
That the film won’t end with the Oakland A’s celebrating a World Series win is immaterial. The thesis is that a vision of operation that values competition over protectionism, and that will resonate.