Moneyball

"Moneyball" is the concept of small market baseball teams using stats to find imperfect players to produce enough runs to win enough ballgames to be competitive in Major League Baseball where there is no hard salary cap (so large market teams, like the Yankees, can outspend the rest of their competitors, even with luxury taxes in place, and get premium ballplayers for their team). Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), as the general manager (GM) of the Oakland A's, has a much smaller budget for ballplayers, and homegrown talents has a way of finding bigger dollars later, so Beane, along with Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) eschew the time-honored tradition of scouting players, and turn towards statistics to find those cheap gems to put together their team in 2002. It's not all bed and roses for them, with many potholes along the way to the chase for a championship.

The script is lively (Zaillian and Sorkin arej listed for screenplay) , the scenes with Beane wheeling and dealing with other GMs in-person and on the phone were fun viewing. The human element was dealt with, as each chess move a GM makes or doesn't make affects families of ballplayers on and off the team, it even impacts Beane's family life. Pitt gives a good performance, he's simply Billy Beane on the screen. There are a few repeated scenes of just Bean's right profile as he's shown driving around in his truck with something on his mind, it almost became a drinking game type of shot in the movie. Jonah Hill, stripped down from most of his neurotic tics, was effective as a statistical whiz-kid. I don't think I liked the casting of Philip Seymour Hoffman as Art Howe, but only because I think of an older Mark Strong looking like Art Howe.

I give it 3 stars, or a grade of B.