Mao and Moneyball: A Case Study in Cinematic Contradiction

Bennett Miller’s 2008 film Moneyball depicts the unfolding on-screen of a contradiction. Moneyball as an idea is a theoretical understanding of how the game of baseball works (based on a certain type of field data – i.e., statistical analysis) that must then translate into practice. As an idea, it faces fierce opposition in achieving something like material existence or success in the real world of historical actors (in this case, of baseball players). The film’s narrative tells the story less of the success of either Billy Beane or the Oakland Athletics during the 2002 regular season than of the dialectical clashes surrounding an immaterial and revolutionary idea (moneyball) striving to become real in some manner of a historical arena (the baseball diamond). And since the dialectical clash and sorting out of contradictions comprise the motive force of history for another type of historical actor (certain revolutionary combatants of the 20th century), my claim is that the writings of one of those combatants, Mao Zedong, essentially captures something of what is actually going on on-screen in Moneyball – that is, the depiction of the revolutionary nature of contradiction and praxis in life.

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One does not readily equate a film about baseball with politics, yet my thesis about Bennett Miller’s 2008 film Moneyball is that it depicts the genealogical trajectory of an idea, one first cooked up in the minds of statistical quants – that is, a theory about how baseball actually works. This idea, certainly within the confines of baseball and baseball thinking, is revolutionary. What these quants or “moneyballers” must do, then, is see if their theoretical understanding of how the game of baseball works can translate into useful knowledge in the field (both literally and figuratively). Moneyball cinematically depicts praxis. Yet the steps for an idea (like moneyball) to follow in order to make it to the field hardly follow a clean line of historical necessity. Indeed, taking something known in theory all the way to practice requires many starts and stops, and because any revolutionary idea at any time risks both becoming and non-becoming, the honest representation of praxis (on-screen or otherwise) must respect a certain degree of contradiction. Moneyball, perhaps unknowingly, manages to capture cinematically this contradictory nature of praxis. As an idea, moneyball is first immaterial before manifesting itself materially on what we might call the field; but from there, moneyball is still subject to recall or even further contradiction (as I plan to explain). Praxis is an attempt at smoothing over a contradiction; yet contradictions on the whole are never resolved once and for all – certainly never resolved in this film, which means asking, in the last, whether Moneyball acknowledges struggle and contradiction as something that cannot be resolved and celebrates this, or whether it propagates the idea that contradiction is something that inevitably will and should be resolved once and for all – as if this is all that stands in the way of some romantic quest, in this case of Billy Beane attempting (in romantic register) to value undervalued Major League Baseball players or (in unromantic register) to exploit these players for the sake of harvesting greater surplus value.

Put another way: the story the film tells can be allegorized as the telling of something else. Moneyball is not simply the dramatic feel-good story of a single magical season of the Oakland Athletics in 2002; rather, we root for the idea itself so that the idea of moneyball is both the film’s protagonist and underdog, given material currency on-screen in the figure of Billy Beane on the one hand (as protagonist) and the Oakland Athletics (as underdogs) on the other. Billy and the As, you might say, are the material substance or historical agents who must put a theoretical understanding of how the game of baseball works to the test of historical struggle – quite literally in the field.

A possible reading of the film as carrying something of a revolutionary mandate invites theorizing on the revolutionary potential within something we understand conceptually as a “contradiction.” In Hegelian terms, whatever manages to manifest itself on the plane of historical struggle does so by giving birth to both itself and its opposite, against which it struggles for existence. Yet as we all know, Hegel was an idealist who believed praxis occurred in the world of ideas (with the material world following suit). Marx’s amendment, in favouring the material world working in dialectical opposition and in possible contradiction to an ideal world, gave birth to a revolutionary mandate based on posterior revolutionary combatants hashing it out on the field. So the lessons of praxis are not to be theorized a priori but are themselves fluid, requiring adjustment based on the continual analysis and collection of field data. In Moneyball, this burden of historical interpretation falls to the statistical quants who must continually attend not to the soundness of their initial assumptions about their chosen historical actors (whether Jason Isringhausen or David Justice) but to the fluctuating nature of real-world data gleaned from the field in the form of statistics. Statistics are set in dialectical opposition to idealistic assumptions about baseball. And it takes a certain “scholar of dialectics” to sort out these contradictions. Billy Beane can be read allegorically as precisely such a scholar. Billy himself is neither player nor, strictly speaking, a quant, though he stands at the centre of the dialectical clash between the two. As such, his presence on film is not restricted to field data alone; he himself is very much a historical combatant.

Billy tells David Justice: “You never seen a GM who was a player.”

Hegel and Marx’s conceptual and respective understandings of the contradictory nature of practice was taken up in the twentieth century by one of their brightest students – himself a combatant on the field who theorized very ably and after-the-fact on the idea of contraction. That student was Mao Zedong. In July 1937, Mao published a treatise called “On Practice: On the Relation Between Knowledge and Practice, Between Knowing and Doing,” which he then followed up (in August of the same year) with “On Contradiction.” Note that the year in which these treatises were written and disseminated was well before the culmination of the revolution in China (1949), which means that Mao was attempting to articulate how something not yet manifest might make itself manifest. The treatises are an exploration of how dialectics work, how to bring something known in potentiality (the victory of the otherwise undervalued players of history) to fruition. And Mao’s insights are worth noting in hindsight only. His works are a staple in revolutionary literature not solely because his reasoning or logic are sound, but because he eventually won in the field.

One reason it may be useful to look at the works of some of the revolutionary combatants rather than, say, the subsequent theorizing of the Frankfurt School is because the proof of these writings as attention-worthy stems precisely from praxis. Whether or not one agrees that the trajectory of Mao’s thought is what fundamentally led to the victory of the underdogs in the Chinese revolution is not really the issue. The fact remains that they won. Mao theorizes that successful revolution requires the correct handling of contradiction. This insight is key to understanding a character like Billy Beane, himself a historical actor; his deft management of a small-market baseball team embodies such correct handling. In fact, we may have further reason here for the juxtaposition of Mao and moneyball if only because such juxtaposition reveals what may indeed be going on on a much broader historical stage of the relatively manageable and controlled setting of a baseball diamond (a field of dreams read as microcosm or metaphor for the field of history). Because Mao won in 1949, we must at the very least entertain the possibility that he is indeed a correct and able handler of contradictions, our judgments always subject to recall. Though on a much smaller scale and an albeit reduced field of historical significance, Billy Beane faces similar scrutiny.

When Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) says “We’ll have changed the game. And that’s what I want,” he is talking not only about praxis but revolution. So he must guide something (an intuition about how reality works, or, more specifically, “baseball”) through to the end, and even at film’s end, it is not at all clear that moneyball will stick – nor is it clear that it should or ought to.1 Counterrevolutionary forces abound (cynically depicted by aging scouts “blah blah blahing” at a personnel meeting, haters on the radio and television, and more subtly but no less obliquely by the manager of the Oakland As, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman). However the term moneyball may have entered into the popular lexicon (even today), moneyball cannot sustain, for whatever reason, not how the game is actually played but how the game is talked about and discussed. Bill James notes that “one reason . . . so many intelligent people drift away from baseball (when they come of age), [is] that if you care about it at all you have to realize, as soon as you acquire a taste for independent thought, that a great portion of the sport’s traditional knowledge is ridiculous hokum” (qtd. in Lewis 94).

Even today, one feels that moneyball is something that “real” baseball people would rather not discuss. Why? Moneyball exposes in baseball something that most people work tirelessly and emphatically day-in and day-out through ordinary exchanges to paper over, something that exposes the hollowness of all explanations, commentary, and even play-by-play. Moneyball exposes contradictions in how we talk about baseball and subsequently, the danger of running such tendencies of verbal speech to how we talk about anything – not only politics and history specifically but reality more generally.

Mao’s philosophy must be included in the canon of revolutionary writings because he won. Moneyball must be taken seriously by baseball people because it works. Both reveal contradictions in an otherwise seamless flow of interpretive logic (whether the historical sort or that encapsulated by color commentary); just because of this, many would rather both just go away.

Note some choice lines that suggest that the Oakland As are not simply underdogs but members of an exploited underclass.

CALLER: You can’t blame [the Yankees] for pilfering the hen house.

HOST: I can’t blame them? . . . It’s like we’re a farm system for the New York Yankees.

Later, Billy Beane says, “And now we’ve been gutted. We’re like organ donors for the rich. Boston’s taken our kidneys, Yankees have taken our heart,” around which Billy offers this dramatic charge: “The problem we’re trying to solve is that there are rich teams, and there are poor teams. Then there’s fifty feet of crap. And then there’s us. . . . We have to think differently. . . . If we try to play like the Yankees in here, we will lose to the Yankees out there.”

The in-here/out-there dichotomy suggests a split between theory and practice and reveals a contradiction. If winners write history, winners also distort history – in this case, about how to go about building a winning baseball team. Yet precisely because the New York Yankees are winners, their way of doing things is all the more difficult to refute. The contradiction is that we must think differently from what the winning team is doing. How on earth can not thinking like the winning team possibly lead to more wins?

Moreover, the split between theory (say, the guiding philosophy of a single general manager and his assistant) and practice (not simply what the Yankees are doing but what the scouts of this organization are prone to do) can be run analogous to a split between knowledge and empiricism. That is, the scouts, closer to the field, are closer to empiricism. As conventional wisdom has it, the GM from on high in his ivory tower (or rather, press box) is separated from sense data and, in this case, putting his faith in another type of data: a type of knowledge bred of statistics. Add to this that in the film, Billy is depicted as being largely uninterested in getting to know his players personally and refuses to watch them play not only on television but, astonishingly, onthe field as well! This suggests that to Billy, direct engagement with field data and empiricism has some sort of corrupting influence. But what sort? This is an age-old dilemma, run in philosophical speak to that between an ideal metaphysical world on the one hand and an ostensible empirical one on the other. And to the practitioners of dialectical analysis, emphasis tends to move away from Platonic metaphysics toward social scientific class analysis of material conditions and things. If we want to polarize the scouts and the GM as standing on different sides of opposing camps, on which side does this film’s protagonist, Billy Beane, lie?

Word versus world

Put another way: If Billy Beane can be taken as the personification in this film of an idea (i.e., with moneyball as the film’s actual protagonist), on which side of the equation of political praxis should he be read as existing? Does the statistical analysis of baseball represent just another metaphysical quest for knowledge divorced from reality, as no doubt the baseball commentators in this film insist (“Bill James never played, never managed”)? Or is statistical analysis indicative of more precise field (i.e., empirical) analysis? Statistics, that is, are not divorced from reality; they come precisely from reality. The struggle between theoretical knowledge and empirical knowledge is touched on here by Mao:

The dialectical world outlook emerged in ancient times both in China and in Europe. Ancient dialectics, however, had a somewhat spontaneous and naïve character [. . .]. The famous German philosopher Hegel, who lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, made most important contributions to dialectics, but his dialectics was idealist. It was not until Marx and Engels, the great protagonists of the proletarian movement, had synthesized the positive achievements in the history of human knowledge and, in particular, critically absorbed the rational elements of Hegelian dialectics that an unprecedented revolution occurred in the history of human knowledge. (Mao, “Contradiction” 90)

Marx and Engels’s break from Hegel came in their addition of the term “materialism” to dialectics, suggesting a pull toward the empirical world of material objects and things known first and foremost through sense perception, our understanding of which at the very least equally mediates or transforms our original idealist dialectics and knowledge. Ideas do not simply clash with each other; they clash principally with things.

The move away from idealist dogma toward something more tangible and concrete seems to invite, colloquially speaking and otherwise, the adjective “scientific” – as though any knowledge away from abstract metaphysical ideas of the way the world (or baseball) works is necessarily scientific. After first meeting Billy at his cubicle inside the front office of the Cleveland Indians, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) has this to say to Billy when the two convene privately in the underground parking garage: “Baseball thinking is medieval. Our approach is more scientific.”

Billy and Peter conspire about moneyball in a parking garage.

The term “scientific” is slippery. If science is based on posterior experience in the field (i.e., the mining of sense data), then surely the scouts in this film are acting more like “scientists” than those logging hours behind a computer screen. Dialectical material analysis also construes itself as “scientific,” yet not solely in the capture of empirical field data (i.e., successful revolutionary tactics in the field) but in the formulation of theory that is subsequently tested and proven in the field.

Many theories of natural science are held to be true not only because they were so considered when natural scientists originated them, but because they have been verified in subsequent scientific practice. Similarly, Marxism-Leninism is held to be true not only because it was so considered when it was scientifically formulated by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin but because it has been verified in the subsequent practice of revolutionary class struggle and revolutionary national struggle. (Mao, “Practice” 77)

Moneyball is a type of dialectical class analysis subsequently tested in the field, and this insight is displayed on film as the script progresses through the initial thirty or so games of the 2002 season. We are watching Billy Beane and Peter Brand test out their theory amidst, of course, wild howls of ridicule calling for Billy’s head. Oakland has just “lost 14 of their last 17 games” and “are 10 games back in the American League West.”

ANNOUNCER. Is it fair to say the experiment has failed? . . . The past 18 games, they’ve been shut out or scored one run four times. They’re just not scoring enough. It’s not just the offense, not Thad Bosley and the hitters. It’s everything. If there was one thing you could pick out, you’d try to fix it, but just everything is in a funk right now.

Despite the setbacks, Peter Brand pleads their case to the club owner: “Our goal and our expectation is by mid-July to be within seven games of first. That would be this working. That keeps us in the hunt.” The answer satisfies owner Steve Schott (Bobby Kotick). The dialectical method is allowed to continue.

The dialectical world outlook teaches us primarily how to observe and analyze the movement of opposites in things and, on the basis of such analysis, to indicate the methods for resolving contradictions. (Mao, “Contradiction” 90)

Mao goes on:

When Marx applied this law [of contradiction] to the study of the economic structure of capitalist society, he discovered that the basic contradiction of this society is the contradiction between the social character of production and private character of ownership. This contradiction manifests itself in the contradiction between the organized character of production in individual enterprises and the anarchic character of production in society as a whole. In terms of class relations, it manifests itself in the contradiction between bourgeoisie and proletariat. (“Contradiction” 107)

Moneyball, as a type of class analysis, attempts to separate overvalued historical actors from the undervalued and, from there, to unleash the revolutionary potential of the undervalued. The stakes, of course, are not so high. To undervalue players in baseball (the players here are clearly the exploited class, whether via big-league payroll additions and cuts, or via moneyball itself) means that players who could have been exploited remain unexploited; the goal of moneyball is to throw off the repressive forces in baseball thinking that prevent such exploitation.

Billy and Peter plead to keep the revolutionary experiment going.

But to be undervalued as a class in the historical sense means being exploited and thus wanting to overthrow the conditions that lead to exploitation. This latter condition is unrelated to baseball, ultimately a game and hence a commodity. To “stay in the show” is precisely the point. The means of selecting appropriate historical actors by the owners is what is at stake – that is, whom should they exploit? The contradiction is not between owners/general managers as “bourgeoisie” and players as “proletariat” – hardly. The real dialectical clash (in the film) is between differing methods of selection, not so neatly or easily demarcated between those in the field (scouts) versus those armed with theory (GMs). The contradiction revealed is between the “organized character of production” (the medieval baseball thinking of old) and the anarchic nature of such selection. Even the scouts in the field abide by certain metaphysical dogmas (the five tools, a good body, an ugly girlfriend) that they believe are corroborated by events in the field. What Billy Beane so scandalously exposes is that they are not. The selection process organized at the level of ownership is indeed anarchical. Choosing based on these criteria, as Billy Beane has discovered via his own subjective experience, is largely a crapshoot. How the scouts, GMs, and ultimately the announcers and baseball people talk about baseball is not a reflection of reality but its distortion. Moneyball, as a corrective, is an attempt to resolve this contradiction, hence a type of dialectical world outlook.

BILLY BEANE: You don’t have a crystal ball. You can’t look at a kid and predict his future any more than I can. I’ve sat at those kitchen tables with you and listened to you tell parents, “When I know, I know. And when it comes to your son, I know.” And you don’t. You don’t.

Yet Billy’s subjective intuition must now translate into praxis. Of course his initial insight is about him and “his shit” (i.e., based on his own lived experiences) as head scout Grady Fuson (Ken Medlock) reminds him, with requisite petulance in response to feeling threatened. Grady, that is, sides with a type of objectivity: “Major League Baseball thinks the way I think,” but as Beane translates (is translating) his subjective intuition of how baseball works (or doesn’t), he sides with an objectivity of his own – statistics, or sabermetrics, the basis of which Peter Brand has labelled a more “scientific” method of selection.

But Grady’s insights have been verified by results in the field – certainly in how baseball people act anyhow. Billy has his own subjective hangups that will require verification. So how to move forward subjectively lacking such verification? This is a tale of dialectics, and the dramatic energy of the film is in seeing how or if dialectics are to unfold. Should Billy spend more time in the dugouts and less time in the press box? Here is Mao commenting on the role of a scholar:

The saying “without stepping outside his gate the scholar knows all the wide world’s affairs” was mere empty talk in past times when technology was underdeveloped. Even though this saying can be valid in the present age of developed technology, the people with real personal knowledge are those engaged in practice the wide world over. And it is only when these people have come to “know” through their practice and when their knowledge has reached him through writing and technical media that the “scholar” can indirectly “know all the wide world’s affairs.” (Mao, “Practice” 70-71)

Billy Beane is precisely the sort of “scholar” Mao is describing. That Billy, as opposed to Peter Brand or Bill James for that matter, has actually “played the game” adds to his authority as a scholar, particularly in his desire to mine not his own field of direct experience, but that which reaches him indirectly through those engaged in “writing and technical media,” that is, the statistical quants like Bill James and Peter Brand who themselves are scholars interpreting direct field experience indirectly through sense data as represented by statistics. Mao comments further:

One cannot have direct experience of everything; as a matter of fact, most of our knowledge comes from indirect experience, for example, all knowledge from past times . . . . [W]hat is indirect experience for me is direct experience for other people. Consequently, as a whole, knowledge of any kind is inseparable from direct experience. All knowledge originates in perception of the objective external world through man’s physical sense organs. Anyone who denies such perception, denies direct experience, or denies personal participation in the practice that changes reality is not a materialist. (Mao, “Practice” 71-72)

According to Mao, the trajectory of dialectics works in three stages. Dialectics begin with sense data taken from the field (precepts) that are then interpreted at the level of rationalization (concepts). These concepts are then applied in the field and tested scientifically. The first two steps are not in question in this film. The point of contention comes in the verification of interpretation derived from the field (the interpretation of scouts on the one hand and moneyballers on the other). Because this is baseball, verification comes in wins on the field, and the subsequent verification via the sudden spike in regular season wins by the Oakland As during the 2002 regular season inaugurates Billy Beane as a scholar of dialectics. He has newly and correctly interpreted baseball sense data taken not from direct field experience but a type of direct field data that reaches him indirectly. Statistics represent the “direct experience [of] other people” – not of the scouts in the field nor that of their quants, but of the players themselves.

Here is Michael Lewis articulating a cruder version of praxis:

By the time he became the general manager of the Oakland As, in 1997, Billy Beane had read all twelve of Bill James’s Abstracts. James had something to say specifically to Billy: you were on the receiving end of a false idea of what makes a successful baseball player. [. . .] A full decade after James stopped writing his Abstracts, there were still two fresh opportunities for a team willing to take [the Abstracts] to heart. One was simply to take the knowledge developed by James and other analysts outside the game and implement it inside the game. The other was to develop and extend that knowledge. The Oakland As had done both, though it would be wrong to say that, in using James’s ideas, they aped James. [. . .] The whole point of James was: don’t be an ape! Think for yourself along rational lines. Hypothesize, test against the evidence, never accept that a question has been answered as well as it ever will be. (Lewis 97-98)

Notice the tense in phrasing. The Oakland As had not exactly done both. Rather, the Oakland As were doing both; the dialectic James is describing can never be completed once and for all, as Lewis goes on to paraphrase James as saying anyhow. A question will never be answered as well as it ever can be.

What we are discussing here are errors in knowledge and how to correct them. When Billy says it’s hard not to be romantic about baseball, he is speaking somewhat colloquially. We are not invited to equate baseball with the poetry of Novalis or Keats; rather, Billy is saying that we like our false stories around which we judge and estimate a game to have worth and meaning, even if this story is largely illusory (“it sells tickets and hot dogs”). We largely don’t leave the game when we come of age. Or rather, some of us do; most of us would rather cling to infantile hokum (i.e., the “good body,” the “five tools”). The stories the scouts tell themselves easily translate into the types of stories an entire class of middlemen tell each other about how the game is played.

ANNOUNCER: You have to steal, you have to bunt, you have to sacrifice. You gotta get men in scoring position, and you gotta bring them in. And you don’t do that with a bunch of statistical gimmicks. Nobody reinvents this game.

These middlemen must explain, say, a manager’s decision about how to play the game correctly. They must explain the logic of baseball. Yet statistical analysis reveals that bunting, sacrifice flys, and stealing bases actually put teams at a significant statistical disadvantage, hence that as tactics, they are done largely to save face over “fear of public humiliation” (Lewis 80). Yet what sort of romantic conversation can these middlemen possibly have about statistical probability?

“Bill James never played.”

If one were to watch the film exclusively, one would believe by its end that baseball has indeed been transformed, that the knowledge Billy Beane has so bravely brought into existence on the field will indubitably be taken up in droves by grovelling GMs and front-office men and women league-wide.

JOHN HENRY: I mean, anybody who’s not tearing their team down right now and rebuilding it using your model, they’re dinosaurs. They’ll be sitting on their ass on the sofa in October watching the Boston Red Sox win the World Series.

But is it true? One need not detail empirically who has taken up moneyball and how effectively in the aftermath of the Oakland As success; yet the film propagandizes the eventual manifestation of this idea in its entirety. It does this by manner of convention because this is what a happy ending entails, that is, that Billy does, in fact, “change the game.” Yet Michael Lewis’s book, from which the film is adapted, takes some pains to detail the non-stickiness of moneyball in the aftermath of the As success.2 The superimposed text concluding the film states the following:

Billy turned down the Red Sox offer of $12,500,000 and chose to stay in Oakland as the A’s General Manager. Two years later, the Red Sox won their first World Series since 1918 embracing the philosophy championed in Oakland.

The Pyrrhic reminder at film’s end is not the fulfilment of the romantic quest we want to see redeemed. As much as we may, out of old romantic habits, admire Billy’s decision not to take the money, the result is that Boston wins the World Series two years later and Billy has revealed himself as overvalued, at the opposite end of Peter Brand’s romantic, L’Oreal-like, and ultimately erroneous interpretation of events. Commenting on whether or not Billy should take Boston’s offer, Peter Brand says: “You’re doing it for what the money says. And it says what it says to any player that makes big money. That they’re worth it.” Yet we have just watched an entire film committed to the proposition that players who make that sort of “big money” are not worth it.

Moreover, the text discloses that Billy himself is patently not worth it—that the Red Sox can get on just fine without him, that he is subject to the same market distortions as so many overvalued players in Major League Baseball.3 The contradictory stance taken by Boston Red Sox owner John Henry (Arliss Howard) reveals both his acceptance of Billy’s newfound “worth” and capital’s simultaneous knee-jerk desire to overvalue that worth.

The lesson of moneyball is to put away infantile and overvalued narratives about players to discover cold hard truths about baseball via statistics alone; yet the reason we watch Moneyball is not to learn the “truth” about baseball nor sabermetrics for ourselves but to watch an equally infantile narrative about capitalism underwriting truth.

JOHN HENRY: One of the great things about money is that it buys a lot of things, one of which is the luxury to disregard what baseball likes, doesn’t like, what baseball thinks, doesn’t think.

Yet the biases inherent in this cinematic packaging of moneyball (essentially of “truth” being vindicated by capital, hence of the market perpetually correcting itself) are a distortion and something the film is not only uninterested in addressing but actively (even if unknowingly) propagates. In short, capital cannot ensure that baseball is liberated from dogmatic thinking; rather, in seeking to corner the revolutionary potential of moneyball, new overvaluations (including that of Billy Beane himself) – that is, the same old contradictions – will breed.4

JOHN HENRY: You won the exact same number of games that the Yankees won, but the Yankees spent 1.4 million per win, and you paid 260,000 per win. I know you’re taking it in the teeth out there, but the first one through the wall, he always gets bloody. Always. This is threatening not just a way of doing business, but in their minds it’s threatening the game. Really what it’s threatening is their livelihoods; it’s threatening their jobs. It’s threatening the way that they do things. And every time that happens, whether it’s a government, or a way of doing business, or whatever it is, the people who are holding the reins, they have their hands on the switch, they go batshit crazy.

After which he proceeds to offer Billy Beane $12.5 million, which the title cards at the end of the very film we are watching reveal as an overvaluation! Henry proceeds – that is, business as usual.

For the sake of market dominance, capitalism is destined not to sort out inefficiencies but to continue generating its own distortions. That this concluding contradiction is so easily missed (even by Peter Brand) is telling as to how deep some romantic bias runs in our souls. It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball indeed, particularly when such dramas are ultimately what sell tickets and hot dogs. What sells (film, baseball) tickets are precisely distortions. We want to believe that Billy Beane has earned (now deserves) $12.5 million a season, but this is pure hokum. We would rather not believe he has made himself obsolete, that capitalism is more readily allied with fantasy, and that fantasy baseball (i.e., Bill James) is more readily applicable to baseball praxis. Speech and reality, word and world (about baseball) remain eternally divorced.

References

Ditizian, Eric. “Exclusive: Steven Soderbergh to Use Animated Bill James Character in Moneyball.” Mtvnews.com., 2009. http://www.mtv.com/news/2432046/exclusive-steven-soderbergh-to-use-animated-bill-james-character-in-moneyball/.

Kenny, Brian. Ahead of the Curve. Simon and Shuster, 2016.

Lewis, Michael. Moneyball. Norton, 2004.

Mao, Tsetung. “On Practice.” Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tsetung. Foreign Languages Press, 1971, pp. 65-84.

Mao, Tsetung. “On Contradiction.” Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tsetung. Foreign Languages Press, 1971, pp. 85-133.

Verducci, Tom. The Cubs Way. Crown Archetype, 2017.