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Billy Beane's Use Of Sabermetrics In The Film Moneyball

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Baseball is a business, an unfair business at that; nobody knows this more than Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics. The film Moneyball covers the Oakland Athletics’ 2002 season, the season where Billy Beane institutes the use of sabermetrics, a rather radical idea at the time. The Oakland Athletics have consistently had one of the lowest pay rolls in Major League Baseball, making success in the bay area particularly hard to come by for Billy Beane. The challenge of working with a miniscule payroll compared to other organizations in the league forces Beane to discover a new way to construct a team. He uses the innovative idea of sabermetrics to find undervalued players and rebuild his team, which has just been stripped …show more content…

He explains “We’re like organ donors for the rich. Boston’s taken our kidneys. Yankees have taken our heart” (Moneyball). Beane compares the Oakland Athletics to a human body and states that their essential organs, their star players, have been ripped out. These phrases paint a very vivid picture of the Oakland Athletics being taken apart by the rich organizations in Major League Baseball. Beane is promoting the fact that the rich often take from the poor within baseball specifically, which fuels him to call for a change within his organization. Later, Beane uses a descriptive simile to try and make his staff understand that they cannot look to rebuild their organization in the same way that they have in the past. He states “And you guys just sit around talking the same old good body nonsense like we are selling jeans” (Moneyball). Beane makes the comparison of selling jeans which is a simple and superficial task, to looking for baseball players, a task that requires a great deal of skill and careful consideration. The use of metaphorical language is not incidental; in both cases it is convincingly descriptive and provides a great deal of imagery with the purpose of promoting a transformation within the entire Oakland Athletics

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