About Moneyball(2011) with love

Whenever I’m feeling down, I watch the movie Moneyball (2011), which is based on the story of Billy Beane, who was Oakland A’s General Manager, and his use of the Sabermetrics to win 20 games in row.

But to me, Moneyball is not a movie about Oakland A`s, not a movie about baseball, and even not a movie about sabermetrics. Some of the conflicts portrayed in this movie were very exaggerated or straight made-up. So then, what is this movie about? This is a movie about Math as a philosophy, or about the people who need it. Sabermatrics is just another fomular based on math. In one scene, Bill Beane asks what`s the meaning of those formulas to Peter Brand. And this was his answer.

“It’s about getting things down to one number. Using stats the way we read them, we’ll find the value of players that nobody else can see. People are over looked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws. Age, appearance, personality. Bill James and mathematics cuts straight through that.”

I’ve never seen such a beatiful line explaining Math as a philosophy. The math, based on the realm of rationality and deduction, makes it possible to look beyond our bias or intuition, and makes to find a value unnoticed or underestimated. This is what I define Math as philosophy. But Moneyball goes a step further. People, who have sufficient resources or don`t have a willing to change, probably would not need this “math” things. Because they can achieve goals by their traditional means, as always. So it’s a certain need and passion(pathos) that ignites rationality, but sometimes that passion blinds the innovator from the fact that they already achieved great revolution in the field.

So, Yeah. “How can you not be romantic about baseball?”, or about Moneyball.