Moneyball message transcends sport

Jonah Hill played a character in the movie Get Him to the Greek that chugged a flask of whiskey and smoked weed in a limo ride to The Today Show where, covered in puke, he told Meredith Vieira that his mom “loves her (bleep)”. His character in Superbad said, “You know when you hear girls say, ‘I was so gone last night! I shouldn’t have slept with that guy’? We could be that mistake.”

Jonah Hill as "Peter Brand" in Moneyball.

Columbia Pictures-Sony, Melinda Sue Gordon

And yet the role that brought Hill the most criticism was playing Peter Brand — better known in baseball circles as Paul DePodesta, the guy helping ruin the Mets — in the new movie Moneyball, about Billy Beane's transformation of the Oakland A's franchise (and eventually the rest of baseball).

“I knew it was a controversy from the time reading the book but then, when I got the part, I never thought I’d be in the middle of this weird thing,” Jonah Hill said when I asked if he realized he had stepped into this civil war during an interview in advance of Friday’s opening of the movie.

Weird thing does not do justice to the absolute polarizing affect "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game," the book by Michael Lewis, had when it came out in 2003 and, now again, that it has finally been adapted into a movie. Lewis portrayed the genius and sheer stubbornness of Billy Beane perfectly, what a guy has to go through to change a culture and what he comes up against to do so.

What happened next with his readers, adherents of sabermetrics guru Bill James and baseball insiders was the crazy personal battle that only kind of was about baseball stats, or the right way to assemble a team, or whether Scott Hatteberg is more valuable than, say, Mark Teixeira. This was about Billy Beanes everywhere fighting against the way things were always done, and seeing themselves in this baseball story.

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Why this became so personal for so many — and I watched many sportswriters in verbal throwdowns over the merits — was because of exactly what Jonah Hill was trying to say.

Moneyball was an allegory for change, no matter the platform. For a generation, my generation, this baseball tale came to symbolize what we were unable to say to our bosses, or the guy in our office who had been there forever and answered every one of our ideas with “no, that’s crazy.” It gave us hope that one day they would see how fatally flawed the old way was.

I have an editor friend, Cody, and he loved this book, argued passionately about its value and admits it was only kind of about the baseball and more about being this young kid in a business trying to navigate change. Lewis' genius, really, was he took this thing 20- and 30-somethings were feeling in all areas of business and used baseball as this really beautiful aesthetic to tell the story. It becomes magic with the backdrop of Fenway and baseball games.

It is probably why non-baseball people like this movie way more than inside baseball people do. They are not nitpicking whether Hill actually looks Paul DePodesta, or whether scouts really were that curmudgeony. Much like in Rudy, they were inspired by the thought that undervalued underdogs triumph.

“(Director) Bennett (Miller) really managed to pack a lot of metaphors and messages into the movie,” Jonah Hill said. “As well as the underdog, undervalued thing, there is a real punk rock attitude about two guys saying the world is round and everybody else saying the world is flat. To me, that is a really brave thing for anybody to attempt to do.”

What the movie does almost better than the book — and I really enjoyed both — was give voice to the very real fear that was the undercurrent of those in baseball so critical of “this sabermetrics B.S.,” as a movie scout so lovingly put it. It became this personal war, playing out in endless Joe Morgan vs. computer geeks wordfests, because it was not only change but a refudiation of the old way.

And why it resonated is because this applies to so many professions, trying to usher in the absolute game changers like Billy Beane while so many people view change as an indictment of them. There comes a point in the movie, when Beane has to decide how much he believes in what he has been selling. It is the best scene in the movie, the trade deadline.

“That’s this thing, right?” Hill says, doing the fist pump that punctuated the scene.

“That scene is the best for me because, honestly, seeing him decide really actively to go for this thing that is really bold and unconventional and scary was awesome,” he said. “Before we talked about it, he hired me, we made all of these little decisions but trading people away that are really conventionally valuable to people on our team for people who aren’t, it’s not about baseball or the trade and the players themselves.

“It’s him showing this overwhelming joy that his ideas are going to be put into practice.”

That this brought more condemnation than say, him telling famed economist Paul Krugman, "My dad likes your (bleep)" underlines how Moneyball was always about more than baseball.