Moneyball, who is Billy Beane and what is his system

“Moneyball” is probably the most used word when discussing the selection of athletes through statistical data in professional sports. The reason is simple and has its roots in the title of a successful film, which in the Italian translation – faithful to the English original – is director Bennett Miller’s Moneyball. The film tells of the Oakland Athletics, a baseball team, in the early 2000s and of their general manager, Billy Beane, who relied on a model that no one had had the courage, until then, to follow with conviction. At the base is sabermetrics, i.e. the statistical analysis of baseball players in the game. The phenomenon was born in the early seventies, but it is in Oakland thirty years later that it gives important results.

History

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Beane grows as a manager under the wing of Sandy Alderson, who was already thinking about the use of data to go in search of undervalued players. When he became general manager in 1997, he hired Paul DePodesta as his assistant. The two manage to set up a team with reduced finances thanks to the results produced by the sabermetric analyzes and will be able to win twenty games in a row even if they will not go far in the post-season. The successes will convince Michael Lewis to write a book in 2003 and eight years later the homonymous film will be released in theaters, with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill to interpret the two proponents of this incredible sporting feat, even if DePodesta will choose not to be explicitly named .

Fame

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The art of winning becomes a real triumph at the box office. It will gross over $110 million on less than half a budget and will be critically acclaimed. The film was nominated, among others, for six Academy Awards (best film, best actor for Pitt, best supporting actor for Hill, best adapted screenplay, best editing and best sound) without winning any.