What perplexed me throughout this great movie was that, despite almost being able to see the Oakland Athletics' stadium across the water from our house, I don't remember a thing about this episode in their recent history.
Basically, in 2001-2 the A's general manager, Billy Beane had lost his top 3 players - Jason Giambi, Jason Isringhausen, and one other whose name I forget - to higher-spending competitors, and was desperate to build a new team given the money constraints imposed on him by the A's owner.
On his travels he found Paul DePodesta - played as "Peter Brand" by Jonah Hill in the movie, because real-life DePodesta objected to being portrayed merely as a statistician - a Harvard graduate and mathematics expert working on the Cleveland Indians' staff.
Beane learned from DePodesta / Brand that every major league baseball team was undervaluing, and not drafting the real talent - people who could make a real contribution to those teams without costing millions of dollars to sign and keep each year.
Thus was born Moneyball: Beane hired Brand to apply his statistical data to the A's acquisition and deployment of new players.
After a rocky start to the 2002 season, the Athletics just missed out on the playoffs, but won the same number of games as the mega rich Yankees, at less than one fifth of the cost per win.
Those are the facts. The movie tells them with great atmosphere, lots of excitement, and plenty of laughs (although this is not a comedy).
Of course, with the memory of their neighbors' (the SF Giants) World Series win last year, where absolutely everyone, and his or her dog, was a rabid baseball fan, I'm unlikely to miss another Moneyball-type episode here on the best coast.
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