Investigating The Myths In Moneyball
Today, one IBWAA member digs into the beloved baseball movie Moneyball and tries to separate truth from fiction.
IBWAA members love to write about baseball. So much so, we've decided to create our own newsletter about it! Subscribe to Here's the Pitch to expand your love of baseball, discover new voices, and support independent writing. Original content six days a week, straight to your inbox and straight from the hearts of baseball fans.
Pregame Pepper - But First…Moneyball Memes
Leading Off
Moneyball Myths - Part One
By Ben Abel
The Moneyball phenomenon hit first as a book and then was followed up with a movie starring Brad Pitt in the central role of Billy Beane. The book, as author Michael Lewis noted in the preface, was one that started because of his curiosity about how a team like the Oakland Athletics who were fielding successful teams despite not having a high payroll.
The New York Yankees in the early 2000s had a payroll that exceeded $120 million against the Athletics who were under $40 million and had challenged the Yankees and lost in 2000 and 2001. As the book and movie document, and it actually happened following the 2001 season, Jason Giambi left the A’s for a contract that paid him $120 million over seven years. That’s not the reason for this article but Beane pushed the team further towards using sabermetrics and analytics to acquire the players to compete with teams like the Yankees on the field because they couldn’t compete with them when it came to payroll.
When Stephen Schott and Ken Hofmann took ownership of the A’s in 1995, they asked previous GM Sandy Alderson to look at slashing payroll, a practice that continued when Beane took over the team, mainly out of necessity being in a small market and not being able to compete with the Yankees or teams like the Boston Red Sox.
Through research and reading and extensive google searches as well as repeated watchings of the movie, it became clear that a number of storylines in the movie don’t paint a true picture of what really went down. I’ll cover one of them in this article.
Moneyball Myth 1: Peter Brand Doesn’t Actually Exist
Played by Jonah Hill in the movie, the nerdy analytics expert fresh out of Yale as an economics graduate never actually did any work for Bean or the Athletics. Paul DePodesta was in fact the real Peter Brand and has had a long history in both Major League Baseball and the National Football League. He currently serves as the Cleveland Browns Chief Strategy Officer.
Who Was Paul DePodesta? DePodesta was born in Alexandria, Virginia, attended Harvard, studied economics, played baseball and football, and graduated in 1995. He did work for the Cleveland Indians before coming to the Athletics but the timeline is wrong as he joined the Athletics in 1999, not like Brand who in the movie moved there after Jason Giambi left in 2001.
DePodesta did not like screenwriter Aaron Sorokin’s portrayal of him in the script and wasn’t comfortable with being used in the movie. In a 2010 Yahoo Sports article, he noted:
“When the book was released, I became something of a caricature. I think a caricature plays really well in a movie, more so than the real me. But I’m not particularly fond of the caricature, particularly since it’s not me. I never was that guy before the book came out and I’m not that guy now. I’ve happened to fall into a couple of stereotypes in my life and, in general, people are more complex than any stereotype.”
In a 2016 article in Nautilus, DePodesta covered a lot of ground relating to Moneyball, the movie, and how it actually went down in Oakland when he was there. He noted that what they did was “born out of necessity. The A’s were a team with very few resources. We didn’t have access to players who were obviously great, who could do it all and were always in the headlines.”
While we have the book by Lewis, the truest story of Moneyball is one that the movie sacrificed to make it more palatable to movie-going audiences, whether they were knowledgeable about Beane and the A’s or the game in general. Don’t get me wrong, I love the movie. But I like historical accuracy too and I don’t think including these facts would have detracted from the story in any way minus the fact that Paul DePodesta didn’t want his actual name mentioned in the book, or movie.
I’ll have more Moneyball Myths in future articles for the IBWAA.
Ben Abel has been an avid sports fan since the 1980s. He has contributed to Sports Betting Dime and the IBWAA Newsletter and has written about hockey, baseball, and football as well as other sports. He lives in Vancouver, Canada. Contact him on Twitter @lebaneb or via email at info@abelmarketing.ca.