Moneyball

When my wife is interested in a sports movie it is a rare thing but as this movie was heavily promoted it did gain her interest. So last weekend we did go see the new film starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill.

Based on a book by Micheal Lewis the book examines the Oakland A's baseball team early in the last decade and the methodology they used to consistently put a winning team on the filed with a limited budget.

Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane the reknown GM who was perhaps the first G M to embrace sabermetrics fully. Overcoming objections from perhaps everyone in his organization Beane sees this as the only way to keep the team competitive after losing Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon and others in one off season.

Pitt is likable in this movie, this in itself is a plus as I do not usually have much good to say about his acting but in this movie he works well. Jonah Hill plays a compostite character, mostly based on Beane's assistant Paul Depodesta. A nerdy kill out of Yale who feels he has found a formula devoid of the attachment to old school statistics such as RBI's and Batting Average.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman has a scene stealing role as Oakland manager Art Howe who hear now in 2011 is not happy with the way he is portrayed in the movie but what seems beyond doubt is he and Beane consistently clashed over the use of sabermetrics in building and managing the team.

In this new world numbers like OBP are more important. As we now know that was just the beginning. Now we have OPS and WARP as numbers that mean more than we may never know in making teams.

This is a good movie. It is interesting. Still if one does not care for baseball it is hard to see the personality of Pitt carrying it to great heights.