In my mind, it’s irrefutable that baseball makes for the best sports movies. Sure, other sports have their advantages, but they generally lack those sublime moments that feel almost divine in their manufacture. Few films have ever better captured this spectacle than 2011’s Moneyball, based on the true story of Oakland Athletics’ general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and his quest to rewrite the unwritten rules of the game back in 2002. It’s a beautiful story of an ex-player turned front-office executive who challenged an entire establishment and succeeded, or at least, I thought he did back when I first saw it. Nowadays, I can’t watch this movie without contemplating how he failed. I can’t help but notice how his model of team building, called Moneyball (or sabermetrics), played a central role in dooming the Oakland A’s, the very franchise it was supposed to save. Fast forward to 2023 and it’s all but a done deal that the A’s will relocate to Las Vegas, leaving behind droves of adoring longtime fans. This feels like the true ending of Moneyball, and it’s certainly no happy one.

After Oakland’s close-but-no-cigar 2001 season, the club lost three of its best players in free agency. At the time – and still to this day, really – the A’s acted as a feeder team for other clubs, as they were unable to offer their players the lucrative contracts that teams like the Yankees could. This predicament was the catalyst for Beane’s adoption of Moneyball, a science that took the human element out of player scouting and replaced it with statistical analysis. In the film, Jonah Hill’s character, Peter Brand, personifies this shift in strategy. He’s a 25-year-old analyst who resents the old way of team building, expressing this privately to Beane, afraid that these views could offend the fossils who run the sport. Impressed, Beane recruits Brand as his assistant GM, and the two set out to reconstruct the A’s roster their way, much to the chagrin of Beane’s scouting department and Major League Baseball as a whole.

After reading that synopsis, I wouldn’t blame you if you think that Moneyball sounds kind of cold-hearted. I mean, the idea of ignoring people’s intuition in favor of statistics and algorithms sounds more like something akin to The Social Network + baseball than it does a soulful love letter to America’s pastime. Nevertheless, Moneyball ends up becoming the latter, as Beane’s cutting-edge method has one hugely positive side effect: it provides unknown prospects and washed-up veterans a chance to play ball in the bigs. This aspect is personified by Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), a former catcher who injured his elbow so badly, he could barely throw a ball. But that didn’t matter to Beane and Brand, who recognized his ability to get on base, a core tenant of Moneyball. And so, they signed Hatteberg to play first base, a position foreign to him, giving him one last shot to revive his career. In the end, the 32-year-old Hatteberg went on to play seven more seasons, a span in which he put up the best numbers of his career. I can’t sum up how moving that is any better than Billy Beane, “it’s hard not be romantic about baseball.”

Without a doubt, there’s poetry in Moneyball, both as a movie and as a science. It’s quite dramatic watching Beane build the 2002 A’s roster and then seeing how its disparate parts mesh on the field and in the clubhouse. When you add in the flashbacks to Beane’s failings as a player himself, the story becomes even more poignant, since it becomes apparent that the resulting chip on his shoulder drove him toward success and ultimately, rediscovering his love for the game. Did Beane and the Oakland A’s win the World Series? No, and perhaps that’s the only thing keeping Moneyball from being the ultimate underdog tale. Then again, as Brand demonstrates in the movie’s penultimate scene, Beane’s journey through the 2002 season was a massive accomplishment, regardless of its destination.

But that’s Moneyball’s second to last scene. Its final one, in which Beane gets emotional while listening to his daughter’s song about someone “caught in the middle”, seems to indicate that screenwriters Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin sense that Beane trapped himself in a difficult situation. Sure, he finds a way to “let it go and just enjoy the show” by turning down the Red Sox and staying with the A’s, and that’s pretty cool. Still, if you take a second to ponder what lies ahead, then you’ll realize he’s dedicated himself to a career of diminishing returns. The end credits even hint at this when it’s stated that the Red Sox, an organization with exponentially more money, utilized Beane’s methods and won the World Series in 2004, a mere two years later. If a franchise like that could use Moneyball and win, what chance would the Oakland A’s have?

Predictably, very little. That’s the rub with any secret worth knowing like Moneyball; once the cat’s out of the bag, here comes the money. And like with pretty much everything, once big money gets involved, it perverts what it touches. In one of the film’s most iconic moments, Brand gives Beane a rundown on Chad Bradford, a relief pitcher who’s woefully undervalued. Brand concludes that Bradford can be signed for roughly $240K, a massive discount. However, that’s the kind of deal you can only get before someone steals your process. Once clubs like the Red Sox or Yankees take notice of its effectiveness, a player who once only cost $240K will now be able to get $1 million or more on the open market. For a team with deep pockets, that’s nothing; it’s a drop in the bucket proportional in payroll to what the A’s would spend. Just like that, clubs like Oakland are priced out of the very market they helped develop. And it won’t be long until said clubs have a decision to make: either spend more, or scrape the bottom of the barrel and pray.

Thankfully, the A’s did spend more. In fact, they’ve even had seasons where their payroll went over $80 million. Yet, they’ve only been outside the bottom five spenders in the league a few times, even when paying out that much. So, when you really think about it, did they really choose to spend? I guess so, but it was really more so to stay commensurate with their competition, which is something they don’t even care to do anymore. In fact, their Opening Day payroll in 2023 was $43 million, which is only $3.5 million more than their 2002 equivalent. Also, when you consider that the New York Mets’ 2023 Opening Day payroll was $334 million, you fully realize how pathetic that is. How could a team possibly spend so little in today’s game?

John Fisher. If you’re unaware who that is, he’s the billionaire owner of the Oakland Athletics who assumed full control in 2016. In the time since, Fisher’s tenure has snowballed into a total blunder, especially now that he intends to move the club to Las Vegas, possibly as soon as 2025. To play devil’s advocate, the A’s were pretty good from 2018 to 2021, yet their attendance remained in the bottom ten of the league. Thus, one could argue that he put a good product on the field, and the fans still didn’t show up. However, one could also argue that the talent they had was a result of solid scouting and player development and that he had little to do with it. Speaking of that talent, Fisher let them all go when it became too expensive to keep them, which is why the A’s are the worst club in MLB at the moment. Also, Fisher and Alameda County have scarcely renovated their dilapidated stadium, one of the oldest in baseball that’s aptly called The Coliseum. On top of that, he never seemed sincerely committed to building a new stadium. No matter how passionate you are as fan, it’s hard to repeatedly pay for tickets when there’s no investment being made in the future of your ballclub.

Whether Fisher has his reasons or not is debatable. What isn’t debatable is that this whole situation involving the Oakland A’s, a situation Fisher is directly responsible for, makes baseball fans like me sick to their stomachs. Taking all of the financial aspects out of it, relocating the A’s to Las Vegas feels like an incredibly insensitive move. Oakland has already lost the Raiders to that city, which was bad enough on its own. If Vegas pilfers the A’s too, can you imagine what it’d feel like for Oakland fans? And then there’s the Athletics’ history in that city, like their 1989 World Championship team with Rickey Henderson, Mark McGwire, and Jose Canseco. A team that once won it all, with style to boot. Surely, they could find a way to do it again, right? If they did, that’d be storybook stuff. But, a team bailing on its city because its owner is cheap and won’t take the measures required to win? That’s nothing storybook about that; it’s just vulgar, practical greed.

Let’s not forget, Billy Beane is still with the Oakland A’s. In fact, when he re-upped with them in 2005, he was gifted a minority stake in the club. This means that he stands to benefit immensely when the A’s move to Vegas, assuming the new city will equate to massive revenue. Therefore, there’s cause to speculate that Beane, the protagonist of Moneyball, is complicit in the undoing of the Oakland Athletics. It’s crazy to think that just 20 years ago, he was fighting tooth-and-nail to hoist that franchise to the top. In doing so, he secured its fate and was there for every stage of its gradual death.

At the end of the day, Billy Beane had to try to win, and Moneyball was always going to be embraced by somebody, whether that be him or someone else. After that, no matter what, the big boys were going to get wise and co-opt it. This means that it was never going to be the long-term solution for small-market clubs that it may have appeared to be back in 2002, or in 2011. So yes, Beane spurred on the model that hastened the downfall of the A’s, but he’s hardly the main person to blame. No, that’s John Fisher, and really, Major League Baseball. Fisher, commissioner Rob Manfred, and all of the other owners have put money before the game, at the expense of the fans and their memories. In Moneyball, Beane asks, “how can you not be romantic about baseball?” Well Billy, I ask you now, how can you be?