Moneyball: The art of winning at the box office

IT’S the top of the 10th inning in Houston and the St Louis Cardinals are battling for the right to keep playing in October, baseball’s favourite month.

Four states and almost 800 miles north-east of there, the Atlanta Braves are still sitting by their lockers, murmuring into dictaphones as they try to find a new way to describe this sinking feeling.

Beaten again, the Braves players keep an eye on the television, hoping the Houston Astros can do them a favour against the Cardinals.

The National League wild card is on the line — roughly equivalent to scraping fourth place in the English Premier League and a spot in the Champions League.

Keep heading north-east, up towards the Mason-Dixon line, another 700 miles along Interstate 85 to Baltimore, Maryland. The Boston Red Sox players are trying once more to explain away one of the worst collapses in the history of the sport: 19 defeats in September on the tail end of a mostly dominant season. About 1,000 miles south of there in Tampa, Florida, the Rays have taken advantage by beating the Yankees and now it’s all square in the race for the American League wild card.

This whole mess will be resolved later today while the quest for the World Series begins Friday. And the chances are that, over the next four weeks, the normally useful statistics — or sabermetrics — which in some ways define baseball will melt into insignificance.

Numbers colour America’s pastime like leaves on trees. They begin to re-emerge in spring, explode into life in the summer months and expire beautifully in autumn, blown around by a haphazard environment which they could never hope to control. The World Series is a cruel lottery.

Every player who has the questionable fortune of dedicating his young life to this maddening trade must cope with the fact that the value of his existence is determined by his OPS, his OBP, how many RBIs he recorded, his BB/K, his GDP and countless other stats which leave decimal points for dead.

For over 30 years, lovers of stats have been creating new and imaginative ways of evaluating players. What began as a cult movement of marginalised geeks has travelled from cheap seats and sharp pencils through mainstream acceptance at the league’s biggest clubs via a big-selling sportsbook followed by dispute and rejection, ultimately ending up as a Hollywood movie where only one figure matters.

This weekend at the US box office, only a 3D version of The Lion King could outdo Moneyball — almost universally approved by film critics but not so much by close followers of the sport.

There’s a 37% chance you will have read the book and, if you haven’t, there’s an 83% chance you won’t be interested but, to make a great story short, author Michael Lewis (The Blind Side, The Big Short) decided to spend a season with the Oakland A’s in 2002 and try to discover why they were able to play way above the strict budget forced upon them by their owners.

There was no one simple answer and critics of Lewis have pointed to all the rest but what’s certain is that Billy Beane, a former journeyman hitter who retired at 27 to enter the Oakland front office (the baseball equivalent of football’s ‘upstairs’) where he would eventually become General Manager, became the poster boy for a sporting revolution.

Once installed in the hotseat, he sourced cheap players from the scrapheap, saving money on scouting by using the suddenly trendy sabermetrics, statistical analyses of the real effects of what a player can achieve.

Once it caught on and the A’s began to light up the Majors (although they would never ultimately win a title, failing to cope with the arbitrary post-season), the big clubs sat up and took notice, destroying Beane’s comfort zone at the bottom of the barrel.

That’s all very well but even Michael Lewis was repelled by the idea of this being made into a film. Enter the star value of Brad Pitt, not to mention his relentless desire to get it made in his role as producer.

Maybe when the film comes out in Ireland at the end of November, readers of the book will watch it out of curiosity. And non-readers will check out what the fuss is about, mystified as to why Pitt is getting so animated about a bunch of second-rate ballplayers.

Mercifully, the minutiae of baseball and all of sport can only be traded around like malleable commodities for so long. At the time of writing, it’s the third last night of the regular season. In the background, the baseball channel keeps me company, a pair of droning Texas commentators superimposed upon the non-committal hum of the home crowd at the Astrodome.

And when the bottom of the 10th rolled around, the Houston Astros produced an uncharacteristically gritty victory to defy their heretofore drab season and, more importantly, to keep the Cardinals and the Braves hoping for the best and fearing the worst.

The one thing Michael Lewis has never been faulted on is his assertion that winning this unfair game is truly an art form.

* [e-mail]: Twitter: JohnWRiordan