- Location: Century Boulder
- What's more important: Batting or pitching? Probably every American who has ever hefted a bat or pounded a glove has taken a side in this argument on ballfields and in schoolyards across the country. Well, a guy named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) has the answer. As he patiently explains to Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), "Your goal should be to buy wins. In order buy wins, you need to buy runs." There's just one problem with that approach. As Billy puts it, "There are rich teams, and there are poor teams. Then there's 50 feet of crap. And then there's us."
- So why would Billy even bother to take managerial advice from a Yale-educated economics grad? For one thing, he's desperate. The A's haven't been particularly bad, but they keep losing that crucial "last game of the season" to teams like the Yankees who buy up all the league's talent during the offseason. As much as Billy likes winning, he hates losing even more. Another reason, however, is that Billy's simply curious about why somebody like the Cleveland Indians G.M. (Reed Diamond) would listen to this young, doughy Ivy Leaguer. In one of the film's many hilarious conversations, an incredulous Billy even asks Peter whose nephew he is. One All the President's Men-style parking garage meeting later, and Billy has poached himself a new assistant G.M.
- Needless to say, the old guard is displeased. Billy's coaches and scouts, played by a stable of brilliant character actors including Brent Jennings, Ken Medlock, Jack McGee, and Glenn Morshower, throw up their hands in frustration. How can Billy trust the heavily mathematical theories of a twentysomething over the well-honed instinct of an experienced scout? As Peter pushes Billy to sign the thoroughly injured Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), the aging David Justice (Stephen Bishop), and the clownishly immature Jeremy Giambi (Nick Porrazzo), we wonder if maybe those scouts were right. For his part, field manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is content to ignore Billy's advice and field whomever he wants. But Billy's not the sort of guy who tolerates being ignored.
- To be honest with you, it's worth seeing Moneyball just for Brad Pitt's performance as a perpetually gnoshing tinkerer haunted by the ghosts of his own disappointing career. It's also worth seeing for Jonah Hill's impressively restrained display of mild-mannered nerdiness. Frankly, it's even worth seeing for the supporting cast and what I'm sure will be an award-winning screenplay. Too bad, then, that it is not a great film. It's a bunch of great writing and acting put on film, which is very different. Perhaps director Bennett Miller was just trying to stay out of the way, but with Moneyball he missed a chance to break a few records of his own.
- Incidentally, I'm not sure I buy the film's thesis, but I suppose I should defer to Barry Zito, who probably didn't win the 2002 AL Cy Young Award for good hitting.
- The casting of real-life shortstop Royce Clayton as the fictional version of real-life shortstop Manuel Tejada wrapped my mind around itself.
