Stats and Balls

The game of baseball is often portrayed as a romantic — even mythic — endeavor, evoking as many heroes, villains and struggles of honor and will as any epic tale. But beneath the simple elegance of a swing of the bat lies rows and columns of statistics and numbers. In the business of baseball, the numbers with dollar signs are the most important — and can mean the difference between winning and losing. "Moneyball" tells the true story of how numbers sparked a sea change in the way the game of baseball is played.

Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, General Manager of the struggling Oakland A's. Ending another season without a championship, and gutted as their best players are lured away with promises of big paychecks, the A's are a dying franchise. With an operating budget that's minuscule compared to New York or Boston, Oakland can't afford the big name players that mean wins and high ticket sales.

A former player himself, Billy is frustrated by the inequality between rich and poor teams, and the way players are valued (or devalued) depending on intangibles like the "gut feelings" of scouts or the player's photogenic qualities. Beane is determined to put together a decent squad with the limited resources given to him, but at a loss as to how. A chance encounter with an Ivy League statistics geek, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), sparks an unlikely partnership. Peter theorizes that since wins are determined by runs, players should be chosen based on their ability to get base hits, regardless of their other abilities.

With Peter in tow, Billy returns to Oakland armed with a pile of stats and a new way of building a team. As expected, their revolutionary idea does not sit well with the grizzled old-timers in the club house, nor with the team's manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who has no say in the matter, and no choice but to make do with the odd-ball collection of players. The players Billy and Peter see as undervalued — older players past their prime, the injured, the inelegant, the occasional troublemakers — the rest of the organization (and their fans) see as the wretched refuse of major league baseball, more rag-tag than the Bad News Bears.

As Billy tries to get the old guard on board with their new way of business, he also instructs young Peter in the back room dealings of baseball, everything from trades to how to tell a player he's being let go. The chemistry between Pitt and Hill practically crackles the screen. Pitt, all glib confidence and bravado, vs. Hill's meek, deer-in-the-headlights look of a young man thrown in way over his head. Pitt appears to be aging gracefully from hunky star to handsome character actor, with a tanned face like a well-worn catcher's mitt and a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. Hill, free of raunch and wacky shenanigans, displays an intelligence and subtlety to his humor that shows a growing maturity and skill that compliments Pitt's performance perfectly.

Both actors have a field day with the witty, winning dialogue crafted by All Star writers Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin, whose script for "The Social Network" made the founding of Facebook play like a Shakespearian tragedy, here helps elevate a story about the numbers and business of baseball to a David and Goliath story about the conviction of one man against an unjust system. And within that epic scope, there are the smaller stories of players shunted from ball club to ball club, just looking to play the game they love for as long as they can. Real-life characters like catcher-turned-first baseman Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt from "Parks and Recreation") and veteran David Justice (Stephen Bishop) put faces to the names next to the rows of numbers and stats.

Director Bennett Miller ("Capote") echoes the grandeur of the script by keeping the film as tightly edited and as constantly in motion as a suspense thriller. It's no small feat to keep an audience engaged through a two-hour film about baseball statistics. Ironically, "Moneyball" is probably more entertaining, enjoyable — and certainly faster-moving — than any major league baseball game. A home run, if you ask me.