Great film, even if you did not agree with everything in it

Rating: 9/10 (28 December 2011)

I know little of baseball, but I quite liked this movie. It is the true story about how Oaklands Athletics manager Billy Beane (a fine performance by Brad Pitt), facing the loss of some of his best players after the end of the season, and with very little budget to hire good replacements, decided to apply statistical methods to find good but undervalued (and therefore, cheap) players. By traveling this path, he gets the opposition of much of the official baseball establishment (though this should not be exaggerated). To help him in this endeavor, he hired a young university graduate (played by Jonah Hill) to whom he soon becomes a mentor, introducing him to the business side of baseball. With these methods, Beane assembled a team for the following season that, while was unable to win the championship, did make it to the playoffs, and generally did much better than expected initially.
The filmmakers are honest enough not to show Beane as a completely nice guy. He has a bad temper. He is cold and aloof with the players (he never travels with the team), refusing to become friends with them, in order to be easier to fire them. It is hinted that he wasn't that good as a husband. Despite these flaws, he is a compelling, generally sympathetic character.
The movie basically believes that human intuition (in the form of the aging scouts) is no match for the mathematical and statistical methods of young nerds. If one has the romantic notion that not everything in life can be quantified, and that in some fields the human brain can still do better than a computer, then one feels oneself to be on the other side of the argument proposed by this movie.
Also, although I'm not very knowledgeable about baseball, it seems to me that the changes proposed by Beane (no stolen bases, emphasis on reaching first base and not taking unnecessary risks) makes for a duller, if more standardized, game. So whether the end result of these changes he proposed made for a more entertaining game, it is debatable.
But despite the fact that I was a bit uncomfortable with its thesis, I did like and enjoy the film.