How ‘Moneyball’ and ‘Sugar’ Altered the Baseball Movie

From “Eight Men Out” to “Field of Dreams,” baseball movies are usually enraptured by the past. Steeped in traditions, these films celebrate homespun heroes whose anything-is-possible journeys toward a championship elevate our spirits. But two baseball movies from the last 20 years had something else on their minds that would alter how the sport was looked at onscreen. Bennett Miller’s “Moneyball” (2011), based on a true story, and Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s “Sugar” (2008), aren’t about tenacious winners or mythic achievements. Instead, they’re fascinated by failure and community.

That notable shift defies a subgenre built on uplift. A baseball movie will often spin a yarn about a band of misfits coming together for an unlikely title run (“Angels in the Outfield”). They can also center once-talented players given one more chance at greatness (“The Natural”), or recall life-changing summers (“The Sandlot”). They tout the majesty, poetry, superstitions and purity of the sport, appealing to truisms lodged in our cultural understanding of fairness: three strikes, you’re out and, as Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

Following the Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), “Moneyball” aims to critique an unfair system not by yearning for the past, but by deconstructing the present. Beane is an executive whose small market ball club can no longer compete monetarily with big spenders like the New York Yankees, so he hires the nerdy Yale economics graduate Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) and turns to the teachings of Bill James, a writer who preached sabermetrics as a statistically informed way to maximize talent. Beane and Brand’s unorthodox approach puts them in opposition to the team’s irritable old school manager (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the craggy scouts who rely on their ingrained biases to evaluate players.

While Beane deconstructs the business of baseball, assembling a stacked roster of discarded players, “Moneyball” the movie also disassembles the subgenre by not really being about baseball. Partway through the film, Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin’s patient screenplay introduces Beane’s young daughter, who hopes the team wins enough for her dad to keep his job. Pitt is wonderful in these scenes, softening Beane’s rigid executive exterior for a kinder, sweeter approach that slowly builds the importance of this father-daughter relationship to the point of Beane turning down a higher paid position with the Boston Red Sox (coincidentally, the A’s are leaving California in 2028 for a lucrative offer to play in Las Vegas).

Seeing Beane’s embrace of fatherhood recalls an imperative moment in Ken Burns’s “Baseball.” In that documentary mini-series, Mario Cuomo, the former New York governor, describes baseball as a “community activity,” in which “you find your own good in the good of the whole.” As much as Beane prizes winning in “Moneyball,” his journey becomes about cherishing family.