"You may not look like a winning team, but you are one."

Rating: 8/10 (12 February 2012)

If you're a sports fan, then you've probably thought about this question - Would you rather have a team of low priced players that had a lot of heart and could perform the basics well under a team leader type of manager, or one put together of the highest paid players who had the best stats for their position and were the best at what they do. The New York Yankees are generally acknowledged as representing the latter (at least in baseball), while any lowly club in the standings will do for the former. Now comes along a film like "Moneyball" that introduces a new element - how can statistical analysis be used to insure that the fundamentals of the game attain their best percentage of success for a winning season?
My personal interest in baseball pretty much coincides with the teams I played on when I was a kid way back in the day. When professional player salaries entered the stratosphere and personal appearances required a fee for the honor of an autograph - well, the idea of playing for the love of the game simply went out the window for me. However on the flip side, I can enjoy a good sports movie if it engages on an intellectual AND entertaining level, and "Moneyball" fits the bill on that score.
I wasn't aware that the Oakland Athletics achieved their oh so close season in 2002 on the basis of the statistical analysis at the heart of the story. Forced to contend with a budget that didn't allow for extravagant salaries, A's general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) was inspired to dig just a little deeper using the methods of a young, twenty five year old Yale graduate who had this numbers thing down pat. Not very different actually from the kind of number crunching that Fortune 500 companies do on a day to day basis. As with all endeavors that are brand new in a given field, Beane and his wunderkind Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), are met with derision and disappointment in the early going. However when the team catches stride in mid-season, they go on a tear that sets a Major League baseball record for consecutive wins at twenty games.
For the casual movie goer, the Cinderella story that was meant to be never occurs, because in life, sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn't. The magic of this movie, and I don't want to overstate it, is that people of conviction, no matter what their field of endeavor, must often face overwhelming odds to have their ideas vindicated. Sometimes they win and sometimes they lose. The winner is the one who perseveres when others are casting doubt and ridicule, and are eventually exposed for not having known any better than the next guy.
You don't have to be a baseball fan, or even a sports fan to get something out of "Moneyball". The idea of keeping an open mind and trying something new when something old just isn't working is what makes the story interesting. Even when Billy Beane's methods were shown to be effective a couple of years later by a Boston Red Sox team that tried to hire him, there are still those old time managers and coaches that will give those concepts short shrift just by a refusal to change. I find that to be similar to reviewers on this site who disparage a movie who admit to not watching the whole thing because they didn't like the story line or found it boring.