YMMV / Moneyball

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The A's blowing an 11-0 lead, only to win on Moneyball archetype Scott Hatteberg's pinch-hit walk-off home run in the bottom on the 9th to seal their American League-record 20th consecutive win might seem like a cinematic fabrication. Not only did it actually happen, it was the third straight game where Oakland scored the winning run in the bottom of the 9th to keep their winning streak alive.
• Americans Hate Tingle: Unsurprisingly, the only markets where the film performed well other than the US was Japan and Korea. Anywhere else in the world, Moneyball was a complete bomb, as it covers baseball, a sport that virtually doesn't exist in much of the world. In fact, Japanese and Korean revenue made over half of total international revenue. Said all that, it's still the best performing baseball movie when it comes to non-US markets, carried there almost entirely by the names in the cast. Unsurprisingly, it was at least still popular, especially on streaming for people interested in sports in general.
• Awesome Music:
  • The combination of music and clips for "The Streak".
  • "The Mighty Rio Grande" by This Will Destroy You, the film's theme.
  • Kerris Dorsey's cover of "The Show".
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Several of the A's Beane was praised for signing in the book were later implicated in the Mitchell Report, issued following a US congressional investigation into doping in baseball. Most notably, Jason Giambi.
  • The Moneyball principle became so widespread in The New '10s, with more Ivy League grads as general managers, front offices not paying established veterans in lieu of cheaper free agents, and every team having entire departments devoted to analytics, that the sport has come under fire as a result, being perceived as less fun and active as opposed to how it used to play. With sabremetric staples such as working counts, a de-emphasis on bunts and stolen bases ("I pay you to get on first, not get thrown out at second"), and using statistics to "platoon" lineups rather than have a traditional everyday starting eight in the field, people inside the sport and out have lamented computers running the game rather the manager, and baseball devolving as a whole into what is referred to as "Three True Outcomes" baseball, where most at-bats now result in strikeouts, walks, and home runs, while disregarding elements like batting average and sacrifices, resulting in fewer balls in play.
  • As of the 2021 season, the A's began actively exploring the possibility of leaving Oakland, having been ordered to look around by the commissioner's office after years of being unable to secure a deal for a replacement of the Coliseum. After two years of failed negotiations, Las Vegas looks like their likely future home after the A's bought a site for a new stadium in April 2023.
  • The depiction of Jeremy Giambi as a hard-living, hard-partying player the A's eventually give up on in light of Jeremy's suicide in 2022.
  • Peter Brand is treated as a prodigy whose statistical knowledge of the game gives him an advantage over older scouts and brass who go by traditional stats and the "eye test". Brand was mostly based on then-executive Paul DePodesta (who asked to be a composite character), who after the success of the A's was hired to be the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. His run was short-lived and mostly a failure; although the 2004 Dodgers won the division in the first year of his stewardship and did draft and acquire a couple of future Dodger stalwarts, his frugal roster build in 2005 led to the second-worst record the Dodgers have ever posted in their Los Angeles tenure, resulting in his firing, and eventually bouncing around the league in assistant roles before leaving for a job with the NFL's Cleveland Browns (who are generally considered one of the worst teams in the NFL).
  • The overall result of what the A's success resulted in, especially for underdog teams like the A's. Sabermetrics offered a way for them to discover unappreciated talent and be competitive with high-spending teams like the Yankees and Red Sox. But when the benefits of this approach became known, even those high-spending teams started using sabermetrics to help with their roster, so that the advantage for underdog teams vanished, and they were right back where they started; having to compete with teams that could easily outspend them 10 times over for the same players.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Some baseball fans snarked about the movie's timeliness considering the A's had recently fallen into a string of mediocrity ^note  including the 2011 season when the film was released, the A's had gone five years without a winning record; amusingly, the Texas Rangers made the World Series twice in that span with manager Ron Washington, who is depicted as Beane's allied bench coach with Oakland in the film and Billy Beane's roster strategy being called into question. After the film's release, the A's revived their Moneyball success by winning their division the next two seasons (2012-13), a division that featured two rival teams who were among the six highest payrolls in baseball.
  • The only negative review of the film among Rotten Tomatoes' Top Critics came from the San Francisco Chronicle; the San Francisco Giants are of course the interleague Bay Area rivals of the A's.
  • Beane pumps up rookie Carlos Peña as a future All-Star to Tigers GM Dave Dombrowski in order to get his deal done. Peña actually would go on to be a future All-Star, although it would be after he flamed out in Detroit and had a Career Resurrection in Tampa Bay.
  • Billy's line about the A's—"There are rich teams, and there are poor teams...then there's fifty feet of crap...and then there's us"—became disturbingly literal in 2013 when a stadium plumbing backup filled the Oakland locker rooms with raw sewage.
  • During one of the early meetings with the A's scouts, one of them discusses how hard a prospect hits the ball by describing the sound it makes as an example of how outdated their thinking is. As sabermetrics continued to evolve in The New '10s, Exit Velocity emerged as a widely adopted metric to determine the potential performance of a hitter. Looks like the scout was onto something.
  • The Co-Owner of the Oakland Athletics is played by Bobby Kotick (CEO of Activision Blizzard) in a cameo role at the start of the film, wherein he repeatedly tells Billy Beane that the team simply doesn't have any money. Considering that Kotick's massive salary and bonuses have become large talking points within the realm of video games, on top of general frugality towards his employees, his protests about how little money the team has despite personal wealth adds a level of irony considering the person portraying him.
  • During a series of roster moves, Billy is forced to cut reliever Mike Magnante to free up a spot on the team. Billy expresses sympathy but notes "I can't have 26 players in the clubhouse." Come 2021, MLB rosters would officially expand from 25 players to 26.
• Lower-Deck Episode: The movie focuses on the role players and a former all-star in the twilight of his career but does not mention the league MVP or the strongest starting pitching in the league. It would be like having a movie about the back-to-back Championship teams of the Miami Heat but focusing the story on Mario Chalmers, Chris Andersen, and Ray Allen without ever mentioning Lebron James, Dwyane Wade, or Chris Bosh.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "He gets on base."^ExplanationIn the film's Signature Scene, Beane sits at a table with his scouts and advisors who disapprove of Beane's roster choices, listing such deficiencies as bad hitting, poor physical health or being "on the weed". Beane defends each choice by stating that only their on-base percentage matters and says "he gets on base a lot" as a retort. Fans and YouTube commenters have thus taken to creating more and more outrageous deficiencies ("But Billy, he stole your wife...", But Billy, he's an axe murderer...", "But Billy, he is literally dead...") to which Beane still retorts "He gets on base".
  • ""There are [Good X], and there are [Bad X]...then there's fifty feet of crap...and then there's [Y]^ExplanationFrom a line in which Beane describes how bad exactly is A's financial situation, but turned into an easy-applicable line to just about anything that's below bad option and further buried under 50 feet of crap
  • "How can you not be romantic about baseball?"^ExplanationAt the end of the movie, Billy says this line after watching a video of A-ball player Jeremy Brown stumbling while running the bases before realizing he hit a home run. The line is frequently quoted by baseball fans both sarcastically and genuinely.
  • "When you get the answer you're looking for, hang up."
• Misaimed Fandom: The Moneyball book and, to a lesser extent, the movie, were widely interpreted as paeans to sabermetrics and on-base percentage. While those specific issues received a lot of focus, the actual point of the Moneyball story is the pursuit of economic inefficiencies and the ways in which underdog teams have to adopt unconventional strategies in the face of systematic disadvantages. Baseball didn't value high-OBP guys with poor defense, so the A's pursued them. One of the ironic legacies of Moneyball is that it led to rich teams like the Yankees and Red Sox being better run and valuing these players more highly. So the A's had to adapt again and find new strategies.
• One-Scene Wonder: Brent Jennings as Coach Ron "Wash" Washington, who gets some of the funniest lines of the movie ("It's not that hard, Scott. Tell him, Wash." "It's incredibly hard").
• Questionable Casting:
  • The 5'11" Brad Pitt playing the 6'4" Billy Beane.
  • While Jonah Hill's character is allegedly a Composite Character, he is pretty undeniably based on real-life Oakland A's executive Paul DePodesta. Which makes the casting kind of funny, as DePodesta is a rather slim, svelte guy who, in spite of his reputation as an uber-nerd, actually played baseball and football in college. There were plenty of rueful comments in the press and among baseball fans about Beane getting Brad Pitt and DePodesta getting Jonah Hill.
• Tear Jerker:
  • It's very hard not to get misty-eyed while listening to Beane's daughter sing for him, especially if you're a father.
  • The scene where Beane's got to tell Mike Magnante that he's being sent to the minors. Even worse when you see the associated deleted scene where Beane mentions that Mags is playing scared - constantly worrying that his next pitch will be his last in the Majors. ^note Even worse if you've read the book, because it gives critical background details on Magnante that the film omits: specifically, Magnante is desperately trying to hang on for enough days so that he can officially qualify for ten seasons in the Majors, which is the cut-off for the guaranteed full retirement benefits that a player gets after their career ends. It's not a massive sum, but to have a consistent little bit of money coming in is pretty useful. Sadly, Magnante is designated for assignment (a baseball way of saying "he got cut") before he'd hit that magic number. From a technical standpoint, he had been in the major leagues for ten years. But from a legal standpoint (ie., the only standpoint that matters when it comes to the elusive benefits), he did not qualify. And the kicker? He was ten days away from qualifying.

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