Evan’s Insight: Moneyball Review

I review an all-time classic

Evans Insight: Moneyball Review

Evan Rebhorn

One of my favorite movies of all time is a baseball movie called Moneyball. It’s based on a true story, which focuses on the 2002 Oakland Athletics and their manager, Billy Beane, as he attempts to create a winning team using analytics and statistics, an idea that was still very new to baseball at the time. While other teams were more focused on things such as Batting Average, Home Runs, and RBI’s, Beane focused on smaller things, such as how many times someone got on base, how many times someone walked, etc. He finds a group of washed up players and nobodies and gets hep from a statistician played by Jonah Hill, and they work together to get the players to buy into the idea that all of these stats impacted every single one of them. I love this movie because it shows a real-life example of how a group full of underdogs can rally together and win. I can related to such things, as winning a championship in 2019 with Northland against other favored teams. I feel like this movie really hits it hard near the end of the field when 1st baseman Scott Hatteberg hits a walk-off homer to cap a 20-game winning streak for the A’s. At that very moment, it captures the films’ main spirit and theme that even if you have all of the info, baseball is still unpredictable. Even if you play as a team, anything can happen. But through all of this, the most beautiful and poetic moments in the game always come at the least-expected time, and the fact that it’s uncontrollable is what makes baseball such a great game, and this is why this is one of my favorite films of all time.