Moneyball and the Neoliberal Fantasy of Intelligence

This is somewhat random but I wanted to write a post about the movie Moneyball (2011) and its relation to neoliberal fantasy and propaganda. (I saw a clip online and it got me thinking about the movie again for the first time in years—plus it’s streaming free on Tubi so I figured I’d watch it). The movie isn’t really relevant now, and is mostly forgotten, as some weird relic of the early 2010s. I remember at the time how strange it was that a movie about sports was such a serious Oscar contender. I also remember how pervasive it was—the movie, yes, but also just the pervasiveness of Moneyball as a buzzword, for using data analysis to gain some kind of advantage that everyone else misses. That was an important propaganda concept at that time—with the rise of so-called “data journalism” and the building up of Obama as the smart rational apex of politics, that if you are just using cold rationality you can solve every problem, even economic and political ones. That, obviously, was completely unraveled and disproven by everything that’s happened since 2016, and the movie Moneyball has similarly fake, as a propaganda piece, in ways that I think are interesting.

So the movie focuses on Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the General Manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team, during their 2002 season. The A’s have a tiny payroll, so to compete against big market teams like the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox (yes the Red Sox were considered big spenders in 2002—how times have changed!), Beane seeks the insights of a guy named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), fresh out of Yale University, with an economics degree. This leads them to sign players who have been overlooked and undervalued by the rest of the league, like Scott Hatteberg, Chad Bradford, and David Justice (among others, but these are the players that are actual characters in the film—others are referenced, but these are presented as the real key Moneyball figures). Eventually, these players pan out, and their skill—especially on base percentage (“OBP”), how much a player gets on base (be it by base hit, walk, or hit by pitch), starts paying off. The movie tracks the A’s on their legendary 20 game win streak, the longest in baseball history, as they wind up winning over 100 games in 2002, during a year when they were projected to be terrible.

The moral of the story is that Beane and his Yale economics advisor used data analysis to solve baseball—data analysis is the hero, just like in the early 2010s data journalism was ascendent (and you might even call Obama the data president). I was an avid baseball fan in the early 2000s, so I remember that 2002 Oakland A’s team. And even I thought that only the characters depicted in the film were the reason that the team was good—until the end when they splice in some real game footage, and you hear an announcer reference “Tejada” and I remembered, oh yeah, Miguel Tejada played for that 2002 A’s team. He ended up winning MVP that year—which you would never know if you just went by the movie. Leaving out the fact that they had the MVP is pretty strange—and also I remembered, as I was looking more into that team, that they even had the Cy Young winner, Barry Zito, leading their pitching staff. So they had the MVP and Cy Young—very few teams in baseball history have ever had that! And it’s totally ignored in the movie—you never hear Zito’s name in the movie.

The point I’m making is that data has always been fake—having good old fashioned sluggers, like Tejada, and aces, like Zito, is always what gets wins. The point of the movie was to promote data fetishism propaganda—so the reality of what it actually takes to win was sidelined.