What Happened To Paul DePodesta (The Real Peter Brand)

Jonah Hill’s character in Moneyball, Peter Brand, is based on a real person — baseball strategist Paul DePodesta, whose life story is just as interesting as the movie. Paul DePodesta was the inspiration for Jonah Hill’s unexpected analytical mastermind Peter Brand in Moneyball, whose approach reinvents the fortunes of Billy Beane’s (Brad Pitt) Oakland A’s. While fictional, the real Peter Brand isn’t that far from the movie character, as Paul DePodesta’s net worth has skyrocketed due to his contributions to the game.

Moneyball considerably reinvented the real-life story of Paul and Billy Beane’s journey to the cutting edge of sports management. The true story is what makes Moneyball such a great baseball movie, however, as it showcases how a fresh-out-of-Yale economics graduate inspires Beane to sign undervalued players and trades. While Billy Beane and Peter Brand’s unique sabermetric method didn’t win a title, other teams adopted it and won the World Series, changing sports management strategy for the better. However, the real Paul DePodesta and his role in changing baseball are slightly different from Moneyball.

Who Is Paul DePodesta? The Inspiration For Jonah Hill’s Moneyball Character Explained

How The Real Peter Brand’s Revolutionary Use Of Mathematics Changed Baseball

Moneyball‘s Peter Brand is a fictionalized character loosely based on Paul DePodesta, a figure well-known in the world of baseball. Paul DePodesta graduated from Harvard with an economics degree before working as a scout for Cleveland’s baseball team, where he was plucked by Billy Beane to come personally fix the Oakland A’s. Just as is shown through Jonah Hill’s 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”).

Brad Pitt’s Moneyball character Billy Beane, who is real, and Paul 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.

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One thing Moneyball didn’t change when creating the character of Peter Brand was that Paul DePodesta was at the heart of this evolution of sports management philosophy. After the success of the 2002 A’s season that revolutionized the sport of baseball, the real Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta were primed to take big career steps, with DePodesta being 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 Paul DePodesta was fired. Because of his status as a status-quo-shaking “maverick”, the real Peter Brand 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 DePodesta’s methods.

The Real Peter Brand From Moneyball Continued To Revolutionize Baseball And Tried Acting, Too

Paul DePodesta Has Complicated Views Of His Fame

After Moneyball‘s troubled development, which saw the arrival and departure of director Steven Soderbergh in the director’s chair and actor/comedian Demetri Martin briefly pegged to play Paul DePodesta, the team of Brad Pitt, director Bennett Miller, and Jonah Hill got the wheels moving, with Aaron Sorkin hired to rewrite the script with Steven Zaillian. The rewriting saw Paul DePodesta decide that Moneyball‘s version of “Paul DePodesta” was no longer true to life, and he requested that his name be removed from the character, which led to Jonah Hill playing Peter Brand.

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This was perhaps compounded by the fact that Paul DePodesta found fame an uneasy companion, and expressed disdain for Michael Lewis’ book and how much his “trade secrets” were exposed. Notably, DePodesta’s story would achieve renewed attention with Moneyball’s adaptation of the book originally published in 2003 to examine ground zero of the sabermetrics revolution.

Whether his position was weakened by familiarity or not, Paul DePodesta continued to live life like the plot of a baseball movie by applying his unique abilities to positions with the San Diego Padres and New York Mets. DePodesta even moved over to football when the NFL decided his analytics approach could be used to evolve their sport. He was hired 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 franchise.

It was revealed that in 1995 while working for the Baltimore Stallions in the CFL that Paul DePodesta also tried his hand to acting, appearing as an uncredited extra in several episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street 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, DePodesta has left a sizable mark on the face of professional sports.

What Is Paul DePodesta’s Net Worth?

The Real Peter Brand Still Makes A Living In Professional Sports

Paul DePodesta’s net worth is difficult to precisely determine, but based on what’s known about him, DePodesta’s overall current net worth is estimated to be around $10 million. Much of this is based on Paul DePodesta’s current job as the Cleveland Browns’ Chief Strategy Officer and de facto president. DePodesta got this job in 2016, and his contract with the Cleveland Browns was extended for five more years in 2020, with an estimated annual salary of $2 million.

What Paul DePodesta Thinks Of Peter Brand

Paul DePodesta Had Several Reasons For Not Wanting His Name Used In Moneyball

Since Jonah Hill plays Peter Brand, the fictionalized version of Paul DePodesta in Moneyball, there’s been curiosity surrounding what the real-life strategist thinks of his movie counterpart. DePodesta discussed his thoughts on the character and Jonah Hill’s portrayal of him in a 2016 interview (via Nautilus).

Paul DePodesta is modest about his achievements in the world of sports, but his contributions haven’t gone unnoticed. When asked about how his initial goals aligned with that of his character in Moneyball, DePodesta admitted that it wasn’t his intention to upend sports analysis, rather he wanted to try and help the team at hand in a new way.

That being said, Paul DePodesta didn’t want his real name to be used in the movie, and while he liked both the book and the film, he ultimately felt that his portrayal was a caricature:

“I just didn’t feel comfortable that however I was going to be portrayed in the movie was going to be how 99.9 percent of the public imagined me to be, and would assume that whatever was in the movie was absolutely true, which it wasn’t. The other problem was I wasn’t all that interested in the attention. It had already happened from the book. And I didn’t necessarily need to relive it,”

Either way, Jonah Hill does a fantastic job as Peter Brand in Moneyball, even if his portrayal of Paul DePodesta wasn’t that accurate. Hill even received his first Oscar nomination for his performance.

Baseball Experts Adopted Paul DePodesta’s Ideas

Boston Red Sox Were Early Adopters In Moneyball Approach

Throughout the movie, Billy Beane and Peter Brand are repeatedly criticized by veteran baseball scouts and sports commentators for their “arrogant” new approach to the game of baseball. However, a scene near the end of Moneyball shows Billy meeting with Bosten Red Socks owner John W. Henry, who admits to Billy that any team that is not using the same tragedy Oakland was using has become “dinosaurs.” In reality, this is very much what happened with Paul DePodesta’s influence on Major League Baseball.

Tampa Bay adopted the same tragedy used by Oakland to maximize its smaller budget and compete with the larger teams. Using the analytics approach, Tampa Bay was able to capitalize on undervalued players like Ben Zobrist and Matt Moore. The Cleveland Indians’ acquisition of Michael Brantley was seen as a key example of the “Moneyball” strategy at work, getting exceptional results from a player who other teams were overlooking.

As hinted at in Moneyball, the Boston Red Socks were eager to adopt the strategy after seeing the Oakland A’s success. They ended up hiring Oakland’s former assistant GM Theo Epstein in 2002 to help guide this new approach. This led to the signing of talents like Kevin Youkilis and the trading of expensive players like Curt Schilling. Using this method, the Boston Red Socks won the World Series in 2004, breaking the 86-year championship drought known as the “Curse of the Bambino”.

Based on the book by Michael Lewis, Moneyball chronicles the Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane as he attempts to assemble a baseball team on a lean budget – by employing computer-generated analysis to acquire new players. Billy partners with a young and hungry economist, played by Jonah Hill, as they develop an unconventional team of players that will change the game of Baseball forever.

Director

Bennett Miller

Release Date

September 23, 2011

Runtime

133 minutes