You have to wonder what they were thinking. The topic of "moneyball" is the sort of thing that appeals to the nerds among baseball geeks. The vast majority of baseball fans, who are the target audience of baseball books and films, have little patience for the statistical minutiae of sabermetrics, and the stakes of the plot as suggested by the trailer make the protagonists into failures. It isn't even fictionalized with fake teams and characters - the movie is about Billy Beane, an actual failure as a major league ballplayer and later the general manager of the Oakland A's/Athletics. The previews have characters saying how if Beane's methods succeed and the A's go on to win it all, it will change baseball forever. As I shouted in the theater, neither happened. The A's have yet to even reach the World Series under Beane and did not win a single playoff series until after the Moneyball book was published. And it's not as if this is some obscure, struggling franchise with a history of ignominy. They appeared in three straight World Series from 1988-1990, under the general manager who would later be the one to actually acquire the players (Jason Giambi, Eric Chavez, Miguel Tejada, Tim Hudson) who were largely responsible for the success the A's would enjoy under Beane's management (acquiring players being the main job of a general manager of a professional sports franchise).

When the A's were racking up regular season success with limited financial means, the sports media, always looking for something new to write about, became entranced with Beane, the relatively photogenic and youthful executive in charge of putting together a roster of players, when most other teams sought success by paying top dollar for the best proven players available. Looking for a simplistic reason and single factor to identify in explaining the success of the team, Oakland's focus on sabermetics and its statistical methods was hailed as the revolutionary tactic responsible.

As the preview admits, the "moneyball" method is akin to counting cards at blackjack, and making your choices based on the statistically probable outcome. The flaw in such a strategy is that baseball is not a game of chance and odds, but involves human beings of variable abilities making choices and playing against one another. If you based all assumptions on probability, no runs would ever be scored. Even the best players fail to get a hit twice as often as they succeed, and a player who reaches first base safely only 40% of the time is considered extraordinary. Yet, these longshots eventually pay off and stack sufficiently to score multiple runs in many games. The success of "moneyball" is based on the large sample of players and matchups in professional baseball. There simply are not enough elite players to go around and as a result, the careful, probability-based strategy of waiting for the other side to make a mistake and offer up an opportunity will eventually pay off. The A's were able to win their division or at least make the playoffs for an impressive streak in the early 2000s based on this, but they continually faltered in the playoffs, always being eliminated in the early rounds. The reason for this is the extended pacing of the playoffs and smaller number of games allows teams to use only their best pitchers. As these are the best pitchers of the four best teams in the league, you can imagine they are not given to making nearly as many mistakes. The "moneyball" strategy of waiting for such slip-ups means Oakland frittered away a number of playoff series waiting for errors and opportunities that never came. Meanwhile the teams that succeeded in the post-season stockpiled good players and played the traditional sort of baseball. Johnny Damon, who rose to the national spotlight for his heroics with the Boston Red Sox in 2004, was well known before that year as a very good lead-off hitter with speed and an aggressive mentality to playing the game when he played for his original club, Kansas City. He then went to Oakland, where the pundits predicted great things to come as he appeared to bring a number of elements Oakland was missing (being the passive, wait for mistakes type of team described previously). Damon had a rather poor season and clashed with the club's policies before eventually taking his talents to a team that used them to win a World Series. Meanwhile, since the waiting-for-mistakes approach of Oakland also required players to hit home runs to make the most of those mistakes when they occurred, it is hardly a surprise that two of Oakland's best players during Beane's reign as the golden boy of baseball executives, Tejada & Giambi, were later implicated in the steroid scandals.

So much for Hollywood.