A remarkably interesting movie, and especially if you love MLB.

Rating: Null/10 (2 February 2012)

I was a great fan of MLB (major league baseball) as a kid growing up. In the deep south we had no MLB in the 1950s but my dad cheered for the St Louis Cardinals, and listened to their games on the radio at night, as they were the only "southern" team. For no reason that I can recall, I cheered for the Brooklyn Dodgers. One year around 1959 or 1960 we drove to St Louis and spent several days there, going to the St Louis and Brooklyn 3-game series.
With that as a background I had no idea what to expect when I popped the "Moneyball" DVD into the player. I knew it was about the Oakland As, and I like Brad Pitt, so I figured it would be a worthwhile two hours. I got a lot more than I was expecting, a fascinating true story of how they changed the way baseball is run as a business.
Brad Pitt is Billy Beane, former MLB player who had been highly prized coming out of high school, was signed, but never really cut it. So he became a scout, and eventually worked up to General Manager of the Oakland team. After going to the world series, and losing to the Yankees, their three best players left, bought off by bigger salaries that Oakland couldn't afford. So Billy had to do something different to win, but what?
The fateful day came when, on a recruiting trip, he happened upon Jonah Hill as Peter Brand, recent graduate of Yale, who looked closely at years and years of MLB statistics. He had developed formulas based on the concepts foreign to MLB scouting up to then. He had a system to attach a value to a player based on such things as percentage "on base". That is, a walk counted as much as a line-drive single to center field. So Billy hired Peter away, and soon made him assistant GM.
The system worked because of the synergy, Billy couldn't do it without Peter, and Peter couldn't get his ideas implemented with someone like Billy, whose only goal was to win. In fact his outlook was (and I assume still is) "If you don't win the last game of the season then no one cares."
Always superb Philip Seymour Hoffman in a role I would not have predicted for him, in crew-cut hair style, is Manager Art Howe.
Really good movie, one of the better ones I have seen recently.