A while back, a friend of mine, who is big into baseball, tried to encourage me to watch the movie: Moneyball, which is based on the true story of Billy Beane. I generally enjoyed the film, and how it portrayed data for the most part. Since this movie was about how data changed the world of baseball, I figured, why not? And like any writer, I then made the obvious leap, “why not make it the first in a series of posts about movies with a data based theme?” This is basically how most ideas get started, honestly. Everything is an idea for a post, or a series of posts, so why not “movies where data plays a part?”

I haven’t been tremendously into baseball in years, primarily because it takes so much time and, let’s be fair, it is a very slow sport. This past year, I did get a bit more into the game when the Tennessee Volunteers took the college national championship, and my local MLB team (the Atlanta Braves) squeaked into the playoffs (but did not fare as well as the Mets, the Braves’ nemesis and my friend’s hometown team). I am going to make an attempt this year, but as yesterday (as I schedule this post) was opening day and I couldn’t see the Braves play without adding another subscription…not a great start.

In this series, I will review movies where data plays a large role in two ways: how data is presented and then as a movie. I will typically spend a lot more time on the data aspects.

Data Aspects

I found myself having two sets of feelings as I watched this movie. First, this all seemed like a lot of work. And then, just how much I wish I had had someone I worked with who so embraced data like this.

A Lot of Work

My first big feeling was how Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill), the assistant GM, actually accumulated the data to do all this analysis. It seemed as if he was working alone, accumulating these stats. For the games, he was portrayed as being in the stands, so it certainly wasn’t being gathered real time.

The work of an army of one?

In reality, for a good deal of the movie, I kept thinking, “did this one person, with an Econ degree from Yale, really build this system, write all the code, accumulate all of this data fast enough to do all of this…alone?” For the initial experiments, sure. Pretty much anyone enthusiastic about technology has done a lot of work for the interest of it all. In the SQL Server community, I have known people who have done similar things over the years. Using data that connects with the audience is a great way to build a compelling presentation. I

His initial presentations and analysis rang true because building a prototype from last year’s data might be realistically feasible and a lot of fun. But as the year progressed, player analysis of how they hit different pitches at different times in the progression felt very real (because of how the real life people changed sports), but as a data technologist, all I could think about was “where did they get all this data?”

There had to be more

So were there more people involved in these processes, out there annoyed that they did not get a mention or at least a nod in the film? Probably. But as data professionals we are well acquainted with being in the background. That said, it would have been a nice touch to have a bullpen of nerdy baseball-loving people that showed up occasionally as they scoured tapes of games, It would have been a big win for my data kin, getting this homage to the incredible pressure they must have been under.

Overall, there weren’t a lot of views of computer screens, so I never felt taken completely out of my suspension of reality there. The computer screens were greyscale, and early in the film, there was some gibberish “code” and very wordy reports that looked like plots in a MATLAB package. Later in the film, there were shots of a bit more modern-looking view of showing where pitches were crossing the plate and the results.

Again, so much data to be gathered that it took me out of my suspension of disbelief a few times, but not so much I sprained my eyes from them rolling up into my head.

The results were very real

Honestly, this movie is something that should be viewed by anyone in business, sales, or marketing. It shows the reality of what data, processed into information, can do.

I worked for a nonprofit around the time period (2002), in support of the transaction processing and marketing team, and we had the same conversations for many years to follow. People who had done the job for years knew what worked and didn’t want to change. It took quite a few years, but over time, things changed as least slightly. But, just like this movie showed…the change is complicated. The language was far different, but when the hard-nosed scout was fired, I could have imagined that same thing playing out if we had had a very strong data lead that pushed this hard.

Data in this movie, and in our marketing, won no games, or could have ever directly won more donors. All it could do is inform people of how to do things better by maximizing what the resources were available. And I think we know that in almost all scenarios…this means a certain budget that can afford certain resources.

In baseball, if you have no spending limit, you could probably buy the best team and win it all every year. But with less money, a bit of analysis, and a little bit of heart, you can assemble a great team that has all the moving pieces you want it to. In marketing, it is just as complex, if not more. Where you spend your money and how people respond is not something you can completely understand algorithmically, but you can do better than just what “feels” like it would work.

In the end, you have to play the game, no matter what game that is. As the line from the movie goes “how could you not be romantic about baseball?” No matter how much data is involved, or how much planning. The bat needs to be swung by a human and the ball doesn’t catch itself because the algorithm says so.

The movie as entertainment

I give it 4 out of 5 stars. Well acted, really good, believable story. It is based on a true story, but you never know how that will play out. Plenty of “based on a true story” movies are heavily exaggerated. It also means the ending rings very true.

I would happily recommend this as an interesting tale of how sports changed from a game of feelings and human analysis to a game of feelings, human analysis, AND data analysis. And as I said earlier, you can extrapolate this film to almost any scenario.

I doubt computers can ever completely replace the feelings and intuition of humans and some of the baseball moves made displayed that. Heart and soul are extremely hard to quantify. But skill over time is pretty easy to see.

Moving moments

There were a few moments in the movie I want to note that aren’t very spoilery, but are very touching.

Conclusion

The first in my series of reviews of movies where data plays a major character turned out quite well. It all felt reasonably real other than the way so much data was accumulated by one person (along with analyzing it and being so involved with the team).

But for showing the power of data to inform decisions at a micro-level and to entertain, the movie is quite good. Quite a bit better than the second movie I watched, Despicable Me 4, which had no data involved at all (but was a cute kids movie, which I like but don’t think would go over great as a review on Simple Talk!).