The Movie Money Ball Review

The Movie Money ball is based on the true events happened in Billy Beane’s life, He is he General Manager of the Oakland A’s Baseball team. Beane and his Assistant GM, Peter Brand hired under-valued players, so that they could reduce the budget with less than 40% of their competitors. In the 2001-02 season, the A’s achieved a 20 game winning streak – an all-time record.

“There are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there is 50 feet of crap and then there’s us. It’s an unfair game”.

“We’ve got to think differently”.

Beane had many limitations. Back then club’s owner had control over the budget; the team pay was controlled by the manager, and the players controlled their own behavior.

Here Billy Bean is the General Manager of Oakland Athletics. We can learn lot thing from Billy Bean like how a leader should be, how important is the leader decisions and how to make decisions at the crucial times. In the movie Yankee introduced three star players to the team out of which Bean decided to make some changes and where he expected them to be under him, make them innovative and improve. Here bean introduced pitcher who is a base player and who throws the ball funny.

Like Beane, you’re going to face some challenges and you’ll come across some negative people that lack the same ambition as you – dismissing change because “that’s how it’s always been done (here)”. If you’re trying to disrupt the status quo and at the same time, beat competitors that are much bigger and better funded, you’re not going to do it by copying what they do. You need to think differently. Using traditional methods when you’re at a disadvantage is a sure-fire way of losing the battle.

I walked in knowing what the movie was about, but unprepared for its intelligence and depth. It centers on the character of the Oakland Athletics’ general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), who after a bad start as a MLB player, moved over to management and was driven by his hatred of losing. In his previous season, he’d taken the A’s to the World Series, only to have them lose and see their best three players hired away by richer teams offering much bigger salaries.

Pitt’s Billy Beane is an inward and lonely man, recovering from a failed marriage and doting on his daughter, Casey (Kerris Dorsey). He’s so driven, he can’t bear to watch a game in the stadium, and sometimes drives aimlessly while listening to it on the radio. He’s fully aware that if he follows his theories for the full season and they fail, that will make him unemployable. He faces fierce opposition from his bullet-headed team manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who feels his experience is being insulted by a manager mesmerized by some half-baked Ivy League theorist.

That’s melancholy, but then this is a melancholy movie. Pitt has some soul-baring scenes with Jonah Hill in which he wonders what it all means, anyway. It doesn’t matter if you have a 20-game winning streak. All that matters is that you win the last game of the season. Even the players are merely inventory, and there are dramatic moments here of players being traded or moved down to the minors. Baseball is a business.