This year marks the tenth anniversary of modern classic Moneyball but in the time that’s passed since the film’s release, what happened to the real-life Billy Beane? Portrayed in the movie by Brad Pitt, the general manager for the Oakland Athletics changed the way teams and players think about baseball with his controversial statistical methods for analyzing players. Since the events of the film, he’s stayed with the Athletics and has even risen up the ranks of the organization.
The film Moneyball – which was penned by Aaron Sorkin – follows Beane during the famous 2002 season of the Oakland Athletics. After losing three star players to other franchises, Beane was presented with the problem of needing to replace them despite the fact Oakland had one of the lowest budgets in the MLB and couldn’t compete with the likes of the Red Sox. Instead of building a team around stars, he used detailed math and statistics that favored runs and getting on base to build a cheap team that would be successful in the aggregate. It was a controversial and hated method at the time, but after the A’s became the first team to ever win twenty consecutive games and had an overall great season, it was adopted by managers and teams throughout the league.
Almost ten years later Moneyball was released to critical and commercial success. It’s now been almost another decade, so what’s happened to Beane in that time? Like Brad Pitt was in the film, Beane was offered a spot as the general manager of the Boston Red Sox, but declined and stayed with Oakland. While the Athletics still have not won a World Series using Beane’s methods, they have done well each season. So much so that Beane received multiple contract extensions, first in 2005 and again in 2012. When the team came under new ownership, Beane was awarded a small portion of the ownership as a reward for his skills and loyalty to the Oakland franchise. In 2015, the Athletics announced Beane had been promoted to executive vice president of baseball operations, a position he still holds.
While Brad Pitt never mentions soccer in the film, Billy Beane is actually a huge fan of the sport. In one of his ventures outside the world of baseball, he worked with the San Jose Earthquakes in an attempt to develop a similar recruitment method with an even tighter budget. His legacy outside baseball is predominantly thanks to Moneyball, and the fact he’s the basis for one of the best performances of Pitt’s career. Within the world of baseball itself, his legacy is hard to quantify. In the twenty years since the 2002 season, his approach has fundamentally changed the thinking around the game. In 2009 Sports Illustrated placed Beane in the top ten GMs/Executives of the Decade in all sports, not just baseball, for the work he did in building a poor team that could stand up to any of the rich teams in the league.
Baseball is a beautiful sport, but it can also be an unfair one. Like any longstanding institution, it can fall victim to set ways of thinking and the harmful influences of capitalism. Billy Beane was able to work against this, and was able to pull something great out of players the rich teams saw as nearly worthless. Like Brad Pitt says in Moneyball, how can you not be romantic about baseball?
