Jonah Hill's character in Moneyball, Peter Brand, has an intriguing real-life story, beginning with the fact that his real name is in fact Paul DePodesta. DePodesta was the inspiration for Hill's unexpected mastermind of the analytics approach at the center of the 2011 baseball drama that reinvents the fortunes of Billy Beane's Oakland A's. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin considerably changed Michael Lewis' book and some of that work went into reinventing the real-life story of Paul and Billy Beane's journey to the cutting edge of sports management.
Paul DePodesta graduated from Harvard with an economics degree before working as a scout for Cleveland, where he was plucked by Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) to come personally fix the Oakland A's. Just as is shown through Peter Brand, 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 shoestring budget with a philosophy built not around superstars but around mathematical certainties (to the extent that it was possible), and their success would go on to influence professional sports of all kinds for years to come. Moneyball's key inspiration, Paul DePodesta, would be at the heart of that evolution.
After the success of the 2002 A's season that revolutionized the sport of baseball, Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta were primed to take big career steps with DePodesta brought in as the General Manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers at only 31 years old. After navigating a successful '04 season, a combination of injuries, free agency departures of key personnel, and management decisions saw Los Angeles turn in its worst season in nearly a half-century in '05, and DePodesta was fired. Because of his status as a status-quo-shaking "maverick", at least in terms of the old school of baseball, DePodesta was hounded by the sport's traditionalists, particularly in the media. Ultimately, they loudly proclaimed his failures to be evidence of the coldness and unrighteousness of analytics' influence on the sport. Despite this, teams like the Red Sox would subsequently win championships by building upon his methods.
Paul DePodesta's story would achieve renewed attention with Moneyball's excellent movie adaptation from the book originally published in 2003 to examine ground zero of the sabermetrics revolution. After a troubled development, which saw the arrival and departure of Steven Soderbergh 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 moving, with Aaron Sorkin hired to rewrite the script and share credit with Steven Zaillian. The rewriting saw DePodesta decide Moneyball's version of "Paul DePodesta" was no longer true to life and requested that his name be removed from the character. This was perhaps compounded by the fact that he found fame an uneasy companion, and expressed some disdain for Michael Lewis' book and how much his "trade secrets" were laid bare.
Whether his position was weakened by familiarity or not, DePodesta continued to apply his unique abilities into positions with the San Diego Padres and New York Mets before the National Football League decided his analytics approach could be used to evolve their sport. He was hired in 2016 by the Cleveland Browns as Chief Strategy Officer in 2016, and he's currently their de facto President, presiding over a recent turnaround in competitiveness for the perennial doormat franchise. In a strange turn of events, it was revealed that in 1995, while working for the Baltimore Stallions in the CFL, DePodesta also turned his hand to acting, appearing uncredited and as an unspeaking extra in several episodes of Homicide: Life On The Streets as Officer McCormick. Ultimately, that childhood dream ended up being a funny footnote on one of sport's most enduring success stories. From Moneyball to the NFL, Paul DePodesta has left a sizable mark on the face of professional sports, even after his appearance in the book and movie from which he first gained fame—or infamy, depending on your perspective.
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