What Happened to Paul DePodesta (The Real Peter Brand)
Although Sorkin took some liberties in bringing Peter Brand to the screen, analytics pioneer Paul DePodesta continues to influence professional sports.
Jonah Hills character i Moneyball, Peter Brand, has an intriguing real-life story that begins with his real name actually being Paul DePodesta. DePodesta was the inspiration for Hills’ unexpected brain for the analytical approach in the middle of the 2011 baseball drama that reinvents the fortunes of Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin changed Michael Lewis’ book significantly, and some of that work involved reinventing the true story of Paul and Billy Bean’s journey to the forefront of sports management.
Paul DePodesta graduated from Harvard with a degree in economics before working as a scout for Cleveland, where he was picked by Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) to personally correct the Oakland A’s. As Peter Brand points out, he had an ace up his sleeve: a belief in a completely quantitative approach to running the team using “sabermetrics” (derived from the Society for American Baseball Research acronym “SABR”). Beane and DePodesta used this revolutionary approach to win 20 straight games on a budget with a tip budget with a philosophy not built around superstars, but around mathematical certainties (as far as possible), and their success would continue influencing professional sports of all kinds in the years to come. MoneyballThe central inspiration, Paul DePodesta, would be at the heart of this development.
Following the success of the 2002 A season, which revolutionized the sport of baseball, Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta were ready to take big career steps with DePodesta brought in as General Manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers as a mere 31-year-old. After navigating a successful ’04 season, a combination of injuries, free agency departures from key personnel and management decisions, Los Angeles saw turn in its worst season in nearly half a century in ’05, and DePodesta was fired. Because of his status as a status quo-shaking “maverick,” at least as far as the old baseball school is concerned, DePodesta was hunted down by the sport’s traditionalists, especially in the media. In the end, they loudly proclaimed his omissions of being a proof of the coldness and injustice of the analysis’ influence on the sport. Despite this, teams like the Red Sox would subsequently win championships by building on his methods.
Paul DePodesta’s story would gain renewed attention with Moneyball’s excellent film adaptation from the book originally published in 2003 to examine ground zero for the sabermetrics revolution. After a turbulent development that saw Steven Soderbergh’s arrival and departure in the director’s chair and actor / comedian Demetri Martin as DePodesta, the team of Brad Pitt, director Bennett Miller and Jonah Hill got the wheels in motion, with Aaron Sorkin hired to rewrite the script and share credit with Steven Zaillian. Upon rewriting, DePodesta saw to it that Moneyball’s version of “Paul DePodesta” was no longer truthful and requested that his name be removed from the character. This was perhaps reinforced by the fact that he found fame as a troubled companion and expressed some contempt for Michael Lewis’ book, and how much his “trade secrets” were revealed.
Whether his position was weakened by intimacy or not, DePodesta continued to apply his unique abilities in positions with the San Diego Padres and New York Mets before the National Football League decided that his analytical approach could be used to develop their sport. He was hired in 2016 by the Cleveland Browns as Chief Strategy Officer in 2016, and he is currently their de facto president, leading a recent turnaround in the competitiveness of the multi-year doormat franchise. In a strange twist, it was revealed that DePodesta in 1995, while working for Baltimore Stallions in the CFL, also turned his hand to perform, appearing as uncredited and as an unspoken extra in several episodes of Murder: Life on the streets as Officer McCormick. In the end, this childhood dream ended up being a funny footnote about one of the sport’s most enduring success stories. From Moneyball to the NFL, Paul DePodesta has left a significant mark on professional sports, even after his appearance in the book and film, from which he first gained fame – or infamy, depending on your perspective.
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