Book Tour, Vol. 7: "Moneyball" Keeps Paying Dividends

Technically, the book tour is over. Technically, it goes on. I had two events over the last month worth mentioning. My Twitter pal Mark brought me down to Raleigh, North Carolina for an event at his film club. I didn’t really know what a film club was, but they offered to pay for my travel, promised a crowd of 200 people, and allowed me to sell books, so I packed my bags and got on a plane. It turns out this film club is a non-profit organization started by local cinephiles. They sell memberships, and use the proceeds to rent out a movie theater once a month and show a film of their choosing. This one was started several decades ago, and has a loyal following, but anyone can do this. More people should.

Around 200 people showed up for a screening of Eight Men Out and to hear me talk about the film. Before we got to the theater, though, Mark had a surprise for me. He had previously recommended a few vegan-friendly restaurants in the area, but all of a sudden, he swerved and invited me to join him at a local sports bar for a beer.

“Is there anything for me to eat there?” I texted him warily.

“Probably not much,” he responded. “But I think you’ll like it.”

I was a little disappointed, but he was my host, so I did as he asked. We pulled up to an unassuming place called Mitch’s Tavern when he dropped the bomb on me: This was the bar where they filmed Bull Durham. You remember the scene. Crash and Annie are watching Nuke on the dance floor, and then he comes over to them and challenges Crash to a fight. They go to the alley behind the bar, where we learn that Nuke “couldn’t hit water if he fell out of a fucking boat.” Then it’s back to the bar to bond over beers, before Annie invites them both back to her place.

The place hadn’t changed much since 1988. It had the same wooden booths, red lights at the tables, and the same smell of stale beer (yes, you can smell it in the movie). They had a little corner of the room devoted to the film, with the original glass door that Nuke throws a baseball through. They even had a “Bull Durham Beer” that was perfectly adequate. Normally, I’d order something a little more flavorful, but when in Mitch’s….

Then last night, I had what might be my penultimate event for Baseball: The Movie. It was a screening of Moneyball at Yale Film Archive. I live about 45 minutes from New Haven, which is both lucky and unlucky. Unlucky because there are no great movie theaters within an hour drive of mine and lucky because we have Yale Film Archive, where they screen beautiful 35mm prints of classic movies every single week. Oh, and they don’t charge for admission. My mother and I watched a new print of All the President’s Men there a couple weeks ago with a packed house. It was glorious. They care about cinema there, and it shows in every detail.

They were also kind enough to invite Bilge Ebiri, Yale alumnus and one of the best critics I know, to join me for a post-screening conversation. I know Bilge a little, and he’s as kind as he is talented. It was an honor to have a post-screening conversation with him, but the only question mark was if I was actually going to watch the film. You see, the Mets were playing a winner-take-all playoff game at the same exact time, and it was killing me to miss it. I considered slipping out to the lobby to watch it on my laptop during the film—after all, I’d seen Moneyball many times by now, including once earlier this summer. My conscience got the better of me, though. I was there to screen Moneyball, and I felt obligated to watch it along with everyone else in attendance, especially since I’d be called upon to discuss it afterwards.

I was glad I did, as I had several revelations during the screening. This was the first time I noticed how the shots of Billy Beane driving away from the stadium always had either cargo ships, containers, or factories in the background. The filmmakers were portraying Oakland as a gritty, working-class town, and Beane as some sort of working-class hero. It’s a nifty bit of misdirection. Beane was certainly one of the lowest-paid general managers in the game at the time when he reinvented the A’s player evaluation process, but he was still management. He was a white-collar guy who lived in a big house, and if he somehow lost his job (which the film tells us several times was very possible), he’d get another job in baseball and be just fine. 

A working-class hero he is not, and this framing is part of what drives baseball players nuts about Moneyball. It celebrates a guy who finds new and exciting ways to pay players less than their worth. It does this by focusing on the three players (Hatteberg, Justice, and Bradford) who he picked up off the scrap heap and turned into usable commodities, and ignoring the team’s MVP (Tejada) and three Cy Young candidates (Mulder, Zito, and Hudson). It de-emphasizes the worker and canonizes the manager. Painting that manager as some sort of working-class stiff is just an insult to labor.

Despite this, I remain fascinated by Beane. Maybe more than ever. Perhaps because of my current circumstances, I couldn’t help but read Moneyball as a divorce movie. There’s that early scene where he goes to pick up his daughter, and is forced to sit awkwardly with his ex-wife (Robin Wright) and her new husband (a fantastic Spike Jonze) and make small talk while they wait for her. It’s a pitch-perfect portrayal of what it’s like when people who don’t know baseball try to talk about it with people who build their lives around a children’s game (I’ll forever laugh at Jonze mispronouncing “Giambi”), but it’s also a window into Beane’s emotional predicament. We are never told why his marriage ended, but we get a sense of it when the new husband tells Beane that “things are peaceful here,” implying that they weren’t beforehand. We can feel the passive-aggression just seeping out of Beane during this conversation, and we know from past and future events that he’s a man filled with rage. He must have been hell to live with

Even for himself. Allow me to paraphrase a Taylor Tomlinson joke: “The worst part of getting out of a bad relationship is the realization that your problems are all still here.” What I was struck by on this viewing is how lonely and angry Beane is. It’s there in the first scene, when he listens to the A’s being defeated by the Yankees. He sits all by himself in the stands at the now-defunct Coliseum, listening to the radio broadcast only in two-second spurts because he can’t handle the pain of consuming it in real time.

He refuses to watch the games during the regular season at all because it hurts too much, and when he finally does come to watch a big game, the A’s immediately start losing. He sees himself as cursed. It’s almost as if he’s enacting a self-punishment. For what? The film talks a lot about his professional past, how he flamed out as a prospect and chose to become a scout rather than languish in the minors. But I’d bet that his anger was a problem in his marriage, too.

Divorce is hell, I’m learning. It’s not the legal proceedings that sting the most or the financial difficulties. For me, it’s the grueling self-inventory. Leaving an unhappy relationship can be euphoric at first, but recently I found myself accounting for all the mistakes I have made. I’ve begun going over all my failed relationships, identifying commonalities (me!), and wondering if I even have what it takes to be in a serious relationship. I’ll probably come out of it. Maybe this is just leftover anger and self-loathing from a toxic relationship that I don’t have anywhere to put now. So I’m pointing it inward. The worst part of it all is to do it alone. When I was married, and I was going through something difficult, I had someone there to share the burden, even when that burden was the marriage itself. Now, I have friends and family members who pick up when I call, and they’re all great. But there’s no one there in the middle of the night when all seems lost.

I get the sense Billy Beane is going through the same thing. He lost his dream of being a ballplayer, he lost his wife, and he was probably afraid of losing his daughter in the divorce. He’s not dating, and he has no friends. All he has is work, and, as the film starts, he has just suffered a devastating setback there. A loss to the Yankees. He needs a bigger payroll to field a better team and achieve his goals, but his boss won’t give it to him. Something has to change, and since he seemingly lacks the self-awareness to change himself, he decides to change baseball instead. It’s the only way out of this horrible moment in which he finds himself. It’s the only thing he has control over.

Am I projecting too much? Perhaps. But both Pitt and co-writer Aaron Sorkin had gone through divorces just a few years prior to the shooting of Moneyball, and it’s entirely likely that the traumas of that period found their way into the film and, 13 years and a dozen viewings later, into the heart of one particular member of the audience. It’s amazing how a film changes with you. Moneyball was always a top-tier baseball film, but now it’s my favorite divorce film. Move over, Kramer vs. Kramer. Billy Beane is finally a champion.