I was a Montreal Expos fan as a kid. But then they left the city and broke my heart. Obviously, I dumped baseball as an object of interest to me. That is, until I saw the movie, Moneyball.
I thought it might be really lame, especially since Brad Pitt was the main actor. I mean, girls may drool over this guy; in fact, my own Pop thinks he's the modern day Robert Redford, whatever that means, but the Pitt-meister does nothing for me. Until this movie. He plays Billy Beane, the real life coach of the Oakland A's baseball team in the early 2000's that has to struggle with a bare bones payroll to compete with huge payrolls from teams like the Yankees and Redsox. It's impossible to compete, right? Wrong!
Billy Beane figures out something very important: He has to recruit his baseball players differently than any other team ever has in the history of baseball. He gets that 35-million dollar payrolls cannot compete with 120-million dollar payrolls. Billy needed to run his baseball team differently. He hired my favourite character in the film, a geek named Peter, played by the ultra geeky Jonah Hill to analyze the stats of prospective high school and college players. THe A's started drafting players that other teams didn't even consider because they had a pre-conceived notion of what a baseball player should look like and act like. Getting on base, anyway possible -- getting hit by a pitch, walking ALONG WITH hitting (the usual standard) - became the mantra of the new-look A's. I love the grumpy old-school grizzled coach and the team scouts looking on in horror as Billy and Peter started assembling a group of misfits, like the wackos from the Island of Misfit Toys (see Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, my favourite Christmas show). A funny thing happened. These runts of the litters, these long-shots at the track, these bad news bears (okay, okay, you get the picture...) suddenly started winning because these freaks got on base and scored runs. And isn't that the purpose of the game? Scoring runs? Sometimes the answer to a problem is right under your nose. Unless you feel a sneeze coming on. Then it can be very messy.
The cool thing about this movie is that Billy Beane was the most highly recruited high school baseball athlete of his era, a "can't miss" prospect who totally bombed at the major league level, and who passed up a full ride scholarship to Stanford university because he believed all the hype that everyone was jamming down his throat about how great he was. It took a lot of guts for Billy to examine his own life and admit his failure and the failure of what people thought they saw in him. My old English teacher would say that's ironic - the poster child for poor drafting became THE springboard for a new way to draft baseball players.
That's some of the problem with kluks like me. Everyone likes to tell me what to do with my life, but I need to find out what I need to do in my life MYSELF, or I'll continue to think that a medium Slurpee is the ultimate fulfillment in life.
Anyways, I think this movie is very cool as it reminds me to keep looking and searching for what I'm about and what I need to do in life. And that the path will have its problems. The movie is full of Billy's flashbacks as he looks back at his high school, minor league and major league experiences full of mistakes, broken promises and failures. It also makes me think that I am a little like Billy. I am different than a lot of people. I don't want to follow the path my parents, teachers and employment counselors think I should. I wish school had more time in its huge course load for me to really explore my strengths and weaknesses. Now I'm on my own. But movies like this make me think that I have a purpose and a place -- I'm just not exactly sure what it is at the moment.
For anyone who thinks I'm a long shot, think again. I just may be your boss some day. Hey, stop laughing. Okay, I'm chuckling a bit myself.
For now, though, I feel like grabbing a Slurpee.