On the money. Ball.

Rating: 7/10 (26 January 2012)

I think the first thing you need to realize about Moneyball is that it's not really a baseball movie at all. It's about innovation in the face of intractable, tradition-bound, go-by-the-gut senses. New thinking versus old thinking. In presenting the view that concentrating on why a particular player is more valuable to a team than another, rather than on his star power or high-profile personality or the number of home runs he's hit is not only prudent but necessary when a team has little money to spend, the movie is an unqualified success. Billy Beane (Brad Pitt, nominated for an Oscar) is the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, a team with a small payroll that must compete with bigger-market teams like the Yankees and Red Sox. The Athletics are not unsuccessful, but they can't quite win it all. When three of their big stars leave via free agency one off season, Beane decides to replace them with players who are not only affordable but who can offer, in composite, more return than the departing trio. Beane's reasoning is that in order to win, a team must score runs. To score runs, a player must get on base. Getting on base is the single most important part of winning. So while other teams make use of players who can hit home runs and steal bases (and pay said players countless millions), Oakland goes after players who can simply get on base.
That this is anathema to the Way the Game Is Played would be an understatement. No one's really paid attention to the more obscure statistics, like OBP (on-base percentage), because who cares? Give me 40 home runs and a 120 RBI, and we'll win. Well, Oakland can't afford that guy, so how about three guys who combined make less than that guy but get on base more often. That's more practical.
Beane is assisted by virtually no one. His manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffmann) despises Beane's attempts to manipulate the batting order to his liking. His scouts are all stuck in the mud of 1932 and refuse to change. Even the players are a little skeptical. But Peter Brand (Jonah Hill, also nominated for an Oscar), gets it. A true stats nerd – he majored in economics at Yale – Brand understands the weaknesses and strengths better than any general manager, field manager, or player ever could, because he's crunched the numbers and has data to back up his assertions.
Pitt and Hill are both amazing and have excellent on-screen chemistry. That's not a sentence I figured I'd ever type. Hill isn't playing just some nebbish who cowers in front of Beane or a player; he's his own man, just a little withdrawn and seemingly out of his element. Both actors take great pains to involve the audience in their stories; otherwise, this would be just a movie about pencil-necked geeks playing simulated games on a computer and expecting the real world to do the same.
The movie takes place in 2002 and is based on fact, but even so I won't spoil the ending for you now. But I will note this much for sure: Beane's overall philosophy has been adapted to such a wide extent over the past decade that Oakland now must find a new angle to exploit that the bigger teams haven't yet found. The very idea that there are more important stats than the typical power numbers turns baseball upside down, shakes it hard, and collects the loose change. To use a cliché, this was a teachable moment for baseball executives across America, and although it took a while for many to catch on, catch on they did.
Even if one removed the many baseball scenes, the movie would still work. It's honest, true to itself, and doesn't digress into meaningless side plots, like forced romance or witty banter. But the baseball action, the result of Beane's work behind the scenes, sells it completely.