SCOTT SIMON, Host:
Baseball is a money game. Year after year, the teams with the biggest payrolls - the Yankees, the Red Sox, now the Phillies, make the playoffs. I know that doesn't explain how the Chicago Cubs have the third highest payroll and finish last. But the teams with the smallest payrolls often see their biggest stars just go off to the richest teams. In the new film, "Moneyball," the Oakland A's general manager portrayed by Brad Pitt, puts it to his scouts.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "MONEYBALL")
BRAD PITT: (as Billy Beane) There are rich teams, and there are poor teams. Then, there's 50 feet of crap. And then there's us.
SIMON: But for at least a few years in the 2000's, the Oakland A's confounded that by adopting a new way of looking at the game and recruiting players nobody else wanted. Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, a man who shook things up for the Oakland A's and for baseball. Bennett Miller directed "Moneyball." He joins us now from Los Angeles. Thanks very much for being with us.
BENNETT MILLER: Thank you.
SIMON: I've read that you weren't particularly a baseball fan when you were approached.
MILLER: You know, I was when I was a kid and I liked to play and had memorized everybody's stats. And at about age 13 or 14 I think it was, it became clear that I was not going to be a baseball player. And my math teacher at the time was the coach of the freshman team in my high school, and I tried out and did not make it. But he made me the scorekeeper and the stat keeper.
SIMON: But, oh, my word. I mean how apt this is for this film because, of course, at the center of it in many ways, is the character who you named ? renamed Peter Brand...
MILLER: Right.
SIMON: ...actually based on a real man. He's a number cruncher, played by Jonah Hill, a young bespectacled Yale economist. He gets hired away from the Cleveland Indians.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "MONEYBALL")
JONAH HILL: (as Peter Brand) I wanted you to see these player evaluations that you asked me to do.
PITT: (as Billy Beane) I asked you to do three.
HILL: (as Peter Brand) Yeah.
PITT: (as Billy Beane) How many did you do?
HILL: (as Peter Brand) Forty-seven.
PITT: (as Billy Beane) Okay.
HILL: (as Peter Brand) Actually, 51, and I don't know why I lied, just...
SIMON: And he says you can sweep out a lot of the stats by which we usually assess ballplayers. We have another clip.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "MONEYBALL")
PITT: (as Billy Beane) Why don't you walk me through the board.
HILL: (as Peter Brand) I believe there is a championship team that we could afford, because everyone else undervalues them. Like an island of misfit toys.
SIMON: So where did they look for their misfit toys in Oakland?
MILLER: One thing that the A's did was turn to ideas that were outside of professional baseball. And a fellow by the name of Bill James, who in the '70s and the 1980s, wrote a series of what he called abstracts, which were analyses of the game that were rejected by, you know, the church of baseball. And he at the time had been a night security guard at the Stokely Van Camp pork and beans factory. And Billy Beane turned to these ideas and turned to his general approach of how to look at the game and employed these ideas and became the first.
SIMON: Billy Beane himself had been just about when he was a high school baseball player...
MILLER: Mm-hmm.
SIMON: ...just about the most highly recruited high school baseball player in the country. He...
MILLER: Right.
SIMON: He had ? the scout said boy, what a build he's got. What a swing. He can throw. And it just never panned out for him.
MILLER: And with the second lowest payroll in baseball that year, 2002, he finds players who others either completely overlooked or were really undervaluing because they were too old or too funny looking, you know, too quirky or flawed.
SIMON: The conventional wisdom was that they just weren't promising ballplayers and they were interchangeable parts.
MILLER: I think the number of THDs and data systems architects and statistical analysts that are in the game right now ? I don't have the exact number but I'm going to say that most teams now have their full-time, you know, analysts that are ? I mean even including the New York Yankees.
SIMON: I can't imagine anyone wouldn't be anything but complimented by being portrayed by Brad Pitt. But do you have any idea how Billy Beane feels about the motion picture?
MILLER: It's funny. You know, he - Billy is a very charismatic guy, very friendly guy, very easy to be in a room with him, very interesting. He's a really good hang. But you could also tell that there's something sort of intense and competitive inside him. You know, Billy Beane is a guy who thinks that he's trying to win baseball games. But I think that there was something going on also. You know, there's a great expectation put upon him as player and that ended up not panning out. You know, I think in his mind he's trying to remedy something from the past. I think he thinks he's trying to win baseball games. But what he's really doing is he's embarked in this adventure that's going to lead him to value things differently, including his own life and that's really what happens in the movie.
SIMON: Bennett Miller directs the new motion picture "Moneyball" out this weekend. Mr. Miller, Thanks so much.
MILLER: Okay, man, thank you.
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SIMON: This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.