Non-baseball people will still enjoy this movie...

Rating: 8/10 (5 May 2012)

...since its dramatic elements are universal: an underdog takes on the established rich and the comfortably smug and beats them by changing the rules of the game.
Baseball was fertile terrain for this, since sport even at the highest professional level is notoriously anti-intellectual and conservative. Baseball men would rather underachieve than face ridicule from their peers by rejecting common practice. This is made clear early in the film. Baseball scouts and front office personnel are shown to be making decisions on team makeup in an ad hoc, seat of the pants fashion that disappeared in most other enterprises with the coming of the information age. But any battle against established wisdom and entrenched power has heroic qualities and makes for compelling drama. Baseball just happened to be the venue this time out.
The story: after losing key players to richer organizations after the 2002 season, Oakland GM Billy Beane faced the same to succeed as them but with less resources. He needed a cheaper product. His response quietly revolutionized baseball by challenging conventional wisdom about player evaluation and showing it up. The fact that the 'moneyball' approach is now almost universal in pro baseball gives the film's subject the weight of historic interest, but even if the experiment had failed the mission itself was heroic and historic.
Brad Pitt, creates a full bodied performance as Beane, a man risks his career and reputation to implement his quiet revolution, while dealing with the fact of a failed playing career and a failed marriage with as much dignity and practicality as he can, and without turning his experiment into a quest. Beane's passion for the game drives him forward without blinding him to the fact that he is running an experiment that might fail. He weathers a storm of opposition and ridicule from others around baseball, from a skeptical and misinformed media, and even within the ranks of even his own team, while he (and the audience) watch the season play out.
Jonah Hill successfully underplays a bright outsider on the fringes, whose insights into the game career baseball men won't admit exceed their own, and who serves as the catalyst and caretaker of the Moneyball experiment. Robin Wright strikes the perfect note as the ex-wife who bears Beane no ill will but who has nonetheless moved on with her life. Beane's personal drama is past, but the big public one playing out everyday in the sports pages should be enough conflict for anybody, including the audience.