Just Enjoy the Show: What Baseball and “Moneyball” Taught Me about Life and Letting Go
How can you not be romantic about baseball?
Before I begin, I have a confession to make.
Not long ago, my answer to that question would have been: What’s to be romantic about when it comes to baseball?
You see, by sports fandom standards, I’m what can be called a fake baseball fan.
I’ve only been seriously following the sport for less than a year. I’ve never been to a ballpark. I’ve never even seen a full game from start to finish. My number-one team is the Yankees!
And until now, I still don’t know what half the analytics measurements mean. (Believe me, getting my head around the differences between BA, OBP and OPS was an achievement!)
But make no mistake: I love the sport.
For someone who’s never even swung a bat or worn a glove, baseball has changed my life for the better. In the relatively short time that I’ve been a fan, it’s taught me so much not only about sports, but about all aspects of life, and helped me re-evaluate how I live.
Which brings me to one of the best examples for everything that is good and lovable about this sport: the film Moneyball.
Yes, I can already hear the diehard fans rolling their eyes and calling me crazy. It’s incredibly inaccurate. It highlights all that’s wrong with baseball now. It doesn’t even have much to do with baseball itself.
Hear me out: sure, this film may get a lot of things wrong.
But I would argue it gets one thing right, and it’s the most important thing of all: the magic of baseball.
I may not have loved baseball for very long, but I sure loved sports.
I spent most of my life as a figure skater. The sport was difficult, draining, and all-consuming, as well as my biggest passion. It was what I loved the most. Even when I wanted to forget about it, I’d keep coming back.
The thing is though, I was never close to being the best at it.
This meant more bad days than good ones. Days when you feel like nothing is going your way. Days when you just can’t seem to get anything right.
And so, for so long, I felt like I was falling short, both as an athlete and as a person. I wanted so desperately to prove something, but couldn’t. I always felt like I could never live up to who I wanted to be.
All this to say, I understood where (film-version) Billy Beane was coming from.
In the film, he’s characterized as singularly obsessed with baseball — and winning. A former first-round pick out of high school, he had dreams of making it big in the majors, but they never panned out. After a career going up and down the baseball ladder, he found himself as the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics, a (supposedly) cash-strapped, small-market team.
In this role, you can see the conflict from the get-go. He loves winning so much that he can’t even watch his own team play, for fear of jinxing them. He takes the team to the postseason, but can never seem to get them to win the whole thing. All the while, he works within a strict budget, giving us the impression that he’s been set up to fail from the very start.
And isn’t that how we all feel sometimes?
Like somehow, the whole world is just against us. Like we were never really meant to succeed. Like we will always be headed on a path straight to nowhere.
The question is, what are you going to do about it?
Here’s the secret to enjoying Moneyball the film: treat it like a work of fiction.
Instead of viewing it as a biopic, imagine Moneyball taking place in a parallel universe, one with a completely different man going by Billy Beane at the helm of the A’s.
Don’t focus on the historical inaccuracies or the liberties the film takes with how it characterizes the real-life A’s team of 2002.
Don’t focus on the man or on the team.
Focus, instead, on how the film portrays the sport of baseball. Because boy, what a character baseball is.
I know, that’s something almost novel to hear, especially now that the discourse surrounding baseball primarily revolves around how it’s currently in the midst of a slow death. And yes, even as a new fan I already have plenty of gripes about the major leagues.
But at its heart, baseball is a beautiful thing. Essentially, it’s a children’s game. When I first started learning about it, I identified it — and I still do, sometimes — as “glorified catch”. It seems so simple, but there’s an art and magic to it as a sport.
For one thing, it’s one of the few team sports where you actually need the entire team to be good. You might have an ace pitcher, but that’s good for nothing if your hitters can’t produce or the rest of your bullpen or rotation isn’t worth a damn. And you might have one superstar hitter, but there are eight other guys in the lineup who have to step into the box.
In a sense, this means that every person on the team is important. You need each person to produce — for over 160 games a year. If that isn’t a feat that really puts athletes to the test, I don’t know what is.
Baseball is also one of the few sports overall not bound by time. In most other head-to-head, tournament style sports (soccer, basketball, you name it), you have a clock that sets limits on how long the game can last. In sports like tennis, you have a score to target to win a set.
Baseball works a little bit differently. Instead of being limited by a clock or a set ceiling of points, you’re limited by the number of mistakes (outs) that you can make. In other words, you can (in theory) have a game that goes on for days, or have one team score in the double digits in a single inning, or come back from double-digit runs down in the final inning of a game. It’s for this reason that the odds of witnessing a comeback in baseball are much higher, as is the possibility of an upset.
In short, it’s a game where anything can happen.
For all the love I had — and still have — for the sport of figure skating, that intense love that kept me going on, it was that same love that held me back.
Figure skating is a sport that demands effortless perfection. In a sport so centered around keeping a smile on your face while simultaneously making the difficult look easy, frustration can be deadly.
This was probably one thing that drew me to baseball as well. I knew what it was like to have success depend on a few small, precise movements. I knew what it was like to live each moment hoping for the best, but expecting the worst.
I’ve had many of those moments break me down. I’d stop a routine run-through if I fell on the first jump. I’d refuse to leave the ice until I landed one jump right. I’d overthink during routines and stiffen up, forgetting to perform.
And for so long, I’ve struggled with getting those bad days out of my head and moving on to the next one. I’d always replay my mistakes in my mind.
I couldn’t enjoy the sport that I loved the most.
The whole premise behind Moneyball is that Billy Beane introduced ideas to baseball — the use of analytics — that were unheard of during the time.
The way the film presents the use of analytics in baseball is admittedly littered with inaccuracies, which only underscores exactly why Moneyball is best not taken as a history of events.
By itself, however, Beane’s embrace of analytics is one of the best metaphors I’ve ever seen in film.
Analytics are very cerebral by nature. In a time when sports were exclusively for the jocks and number-crunching exclusively for the classroom nerds, introducing statistics into baseball was simply insane.
This is what makes viewing the film through a contemporary lens quite jarring. Although it is hard to believe now, there was a time when numbers had very little to do with how the game was played.
And that’s the film’s selling point of Beane. He was someone who — without meaning to — ended up changing the sport. He was a revolutionary.
Now, juxtapose this with what is possibly the film’s most poignant and defining scene.
In the film’s closing scene, Beane has just been eliminated from the playoffs again, despite a historic regular season campaign. As he contemplates his future, he listens to a CD his daughter — an aspiring musician — gave him, with a song that she wrote.
I’m so scared but I don’t show it / I can’t figure it out / It’s bringing me down / I know, I’ve got to let it go / And just enjoy the show
Many would recognize this from the real-life sleeper hit The Show by Lenka. That song was released in 2008. The film is set in 2002.
This anachronistic use of The Show encapsulates the entire essence of the film. Its lyrics are perfect for Beane’s situation.
For so long, he has been unable to let go — of his failures of an athlete, of his own team’s losses, of his obsession with winning the final game of the year. He forgot what he loved most about baseball and what made it magical in the first place.
And yet, it shows how he was ahead of his time. He didn’t know it yet, but his methods — though derided at the time — would end up shaping the future of baseball.
But the only way to get to that future is to see it through.
To keep going amidst all the failures.
To live every moment of the ride, both the highs and the lows.
To let go.
And just enjoy — a nickname for the Major Leagues — The Show.
If there’s anything the past year has proven, it’s that there are many things that we do not control.
We can’t change the past. Heck, we can barely change our present. Life will always throw us curve balls — and yes, we will swing and miss more often than we will hit. And it’s so tempting to dwell on your past failures and to doubt yourself and to just call it quits.
But as in baseball, there’s really only one thing we can do: move on to the next, and try again.
One failure is not the end of the world. It doesn’t mean that things cannot get better. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t more in store for us down the line. It doesn’t mean that life isn’t worth living.
After all, each at-bat is a new opportunity to hit a home run. And who knows, you may have hit one already, and you just don’t know it yet.
The only way to find out is to step back and let go.
Sure, we might be so scared.
We might not be able to figure it out.
And we might feel down.
But there’s always magic to be found in The Show that is this life we’re given.
How can you not be romantic about that?
