I know. I know.
I’m way behind.
Ever since it was first released in 2011, my wife and I have wanted to see the movie Moneyball. But as often happens, work demands, kids and simply life has prevented us from seeing it time and time again. This weekend, however, we saw it. And it was phenomenal. Moneyball is a captivating sports drama with moments of thrilling inspiration and sheer poignancy. It is thoughtful, witty and intelligent. But the movie was also instructive. It reminded me about something I forgot about my Catholic Faith.
Let me explain.
(Now if you haven’t seen the movie, be warned that there are spoilers in the following description)…
If you are not familiar with (or have forgotten) the premise of the movie, let me briefly describe it. The year is 2002. Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) is the General Manager for the Oakland A’s, a major league baseball team. Billy Beane and his team are licking their wounds from a crushing defeat to the New York Yankees in the 2001 postseason. Now they are faced with a 2002 season bereft of significant talent as their star players fade away into free agency. Struggling to compete as a small market team in a league dominated by big market teams awash in cash, Beane is forced to think unconventionally about how to win more games with less money. Enter Peter Brand (Jonah Hill).
Peter Brand is an awkward, obese Yale-educated statistical savant who has innovative, unorthodox ideas about how to win baseball games. A desperate Beane, disillusioned with the uninspired groupthink of his scouts and support staff, decides to take a gamble and makes Brand his Assistant General Manager. What ensues is a tumultuous (and wondrous) ride through the 2002 season filled with conflicts and losses, naysayers and self-doubt incomprehensibly giving way to brilliant success and broken records, confidences restored and hopes resurrected. Billy Beane, like a phoenix rising out of the ashes of a failed marriage and aborted baseball career, had gambled…and won.
And yet.
And yet in spite of an extraordinary 20 game winning streak and a team transformed on a low budget and high math, the 2002 Oakland A’s would lose shortly into the postseason. And Billy Beane would find himself devastated. In spite of everything, Beane’s hopes that a small market team could think creatively, win a championship and thereby upset the balance of a money-dominated major league power structure were utterly dashed.
And it was the scene that came next that blew my mind.
Finding a crestfallen Beane sitting in the bowels of the stadium days after the loss, assistant G.M. Peter Brand, in his awkward but earnest fashion, approaches him. And the following dialogue ensues,
Billy Beane: I really wanted to win here. I really did.
Peter Brand: I think you won pretty big, Billy.
Billy Beane: Pete, we lost. We lost.
Peter Brand: It’s only been a few days. You gotta give yourself some time to get over it.
Billy Beane: You know, I…I don’t get over these things. Ever.
Peter Brand: Come with me to the video room, I wanna show you something.
Billy Beane: No, man, I’m not feeling…right now.
Peter Brand: Come on, Billy. Seriously. Come on, Billy. Come on.[Peter shows Billy a tape of a [minor league] Oaks game]
Peter Brand: The Visalia Oaks and our two hundred and forty pounds catcher, Jeremy Brown, who as you know is scared to run to second base. This is in the game six weeks ago. This guy is gonna start him off with a fast ball. Jeremy’s gonna take it into deep center.
[tape shows Jeremy hitting the ball and starts running and Peter pauses the tape]
Peter Brand: Here’s what’s really interesting. Because Jeremy is gonna do what he never does, he’s gonna go for it. He’s gonna round first and he’s gonna go for it. Okay?
[he starts the tape again and Billy watches it closely]
Peter Brand: This is all Jeremy’s nightmare’s coming to life.
[Jeremy rounds first, trips and awkwardly crawls back to first base embarrassed]
Billy Beane: Ah, they’re laughing at him.
Peter Brand: And Jeremy’s about to find out why.
[he pauses the tape again]
Peter Brand: Jeremy is about to realize that the ball went sixty feet over the fence. He hit a home run and didn’t even realize it.
Jeremy picks himself up, supported by the opposing players and cheered by the home crowd, and runs the bases, arriving at home plate to a warm, cheering reception by his teammates. At first, he was lamenting his foolishness. At last, he was overjoyed at what he actually accomplished. Peter Brand searches Billy Beane’s face to see if he fully understands his point,
Billy Beane: How can you not be romantic about baseball?
Peter Brand: It’s a metaphor.
Billy Beane: I know it’s a metaphor.
[Billy gets up to leave]
Billy Beane: Okay. Pete, you’re a good egg. I’ll call you.
Wow.
And it got me thinking…
Perhaps when St. Peter found himself hanging upside down on a cross as a Roman spectacle, perhaps when Mother Teresa breathed her last with diaries filled with angst and her slums still overfilled with misery, perhaps when St. Therese of Lisieux succumbed to the ravages of tuberculosis in an obscure convent at the tender age of twenty-four, and perhaps when Flannery O’Connor died from lupus at the age of 39 still unmarried, living with her mother surrounded by peacocks…perhaps they all felt that they had flubbed it. Perhaps they felt that they barely got on base and were humiliated in the process of just doing that. Perhaps they had moments where they felt they had let their team down.
Perhaps.
And perhaps sometimes we do too.
But if they were to lift their eyes and look – simply look – they would realize that, in fact, the ball they hit did go over the fence. And now…now was the time for them to get up with the help of others, dust themselves off and start running as the rising roars of cheering support envelope and carry them until they arrive. Until they arrive Home.
Billy Beane understood the metaphor. He had hit a home run. He just needed an unconventional faith to see it. So too for the Saints and bright lights of our Faith. So too for us.
What a beautiful lesson. What a beautiful story.
Thanks Moneyball.
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