Review: Moneyball

Sony Pictures

Moneyball is a good movie. It’s also a good baseball movie, but it isn’t like most sports flicks where some woebegone team triumphs in the stirring final minutes. Moneyball is about the business of baseball, the backroom stuff that goes into making a professional team.

Brad Pitt plays Billie Beane, General Manager of the Oakland A’s, a small market team with a small market budget. That constraint makes it tough to compete with say, the New York Yankees, so Beane sits down with the team’s owner and insists on more cash to pick up better players. Owner says no, and Beane sets off to make do, but then on an off season scouting trip to Cleveland he meets a young man with a new idea for assessing the worth of a baseball player: using computer analysis to determine a player’s value, focusing in particular on his ability to get on base. Intrigued, Beane hires Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill) and the two of them crunch the numbers to come up with a roster that is affordable and has the potential to make a winning team. (Moneyball is based on true events, but the Peter Brand character is invented; Beane's actual partner in crime during the 2002 season was Paul DePodesta, who declined to have his name and likeness used in the film.)

But once the scrappy new team is recruited, the going is still tough; Beane is surrounded by a staff of old dudes who don’t see any reason to change the way they have been doing business, so they don’t like the roster and they don’t want to work the GM’s plan. The scouts are unhappy, but the coach (played by a portly Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is just plain resistant, so it’s tough for Beane to realize his vision. But this is where the fun starts, because Beane has to maneuver around these naysayers in order to find a way to turn a team of apparent misfits into something worth remembering.

Brad Pitt is terrific; you don’t really forget that he’s Brad Pitt but you believe he’s Billy Beane anyway. His scenes with Jonah Hill have a satisfying odd couple vibe, and Hill is great as the nerdy Ivy grad who loves the game, even if he can’t play it for a living. This is lighthearted entertainment but it’s well done, definitely a fun night out at the movies. Playing everywhere. B