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Film Description
Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill and Philip Seymour Hoffman star in this critically-acclaimed baseball drama nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Actor and Best Picture. Based on real events in 2002, Moneyball follows the unconventional tactics employed by Billy Beane (Pitt), general manager of the cash-strapped Oakland Athletics baseball team, to rebuild his club after losing a few key players to the Major League.
Beane enlists the services of Yale economics graduate Peter Brand (Hill) to devise an unorthodox player selection system based on a sophisticated statistical analysis of each player's skills. As Billy and Peter start to build their team based on computer-generated data rather than the traditional scouting methods, they meet with resistance from old hands such as team manager Art Howe (Hoffman). But when the club begins a winning streak with its roster of inexpensive 'wild card' players, the naysayers are forced to admit that the scheme appears to be working.
"Moneyball" -
Howard Schumann on 12th January 2012
Today every team uses a computerized analysis of a baseball players value called sabermetrics, a tool that is supposed to provide information such as how often a playe... more >
Today every team uses a computerized analysis of a baseball players value called sabermetrics, a tool that is supposed to provide information such as how often a player will get on base. This new approach is dramatized in Bennett Millers Moneyball, an entertaining and often moving film about Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), a former player who became the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics in 1998, and who changed the game forever.
Using authentic recreations as well as archival footage, Moneyball opens in 2002 with the As General Manager confronting the daunting task of replacing three of his key players. In flashbacks, we learn that the young Billy Beane (Reed Thompson) was heralded by scouts as a five-tool player who signed him out of high school in 1979, but, after a brief and unsuccessful career as a player, he turned to scouting and then management. Things take a sharp turn when Beane has a chance meeting with an Economics graduate from Yale University who is working for the Cleveland Indians.
Brand is a disciple of Bill James, the man who developed sabermetrics and who had come to believe that a players on-base percentage was more important to the team than just his batting average. When Beane snatches Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a young Economics graduate from Yale, away from the Indians and appoints him as his personal assistant, the team begins to use statistical analysis to seek out players whose value to other teams may have diminished, and who are now available at a lower price.
Though the GM is often pictured as volatile and aloof, scenes with his ex-wife and daughter show him to be a warm and caring person with a passion for baseball who maintained that nothing mattered to him except winning the final game, and that his real goal was to change the way teams are constructed. Today, sabermetrics has become an accepted part of the game and Beane is remembered as an innovator.
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