It was supposed to be the biggest home run of the year. Aaron Sorkin adapting a screenplay about baseball? Are you serious, why don’t you just bathe me in diet soda and sprinkle some sour patch watermelons on top?

The story for Moneyball was taken from the book of the same name by Michael Lewis. It chronicles the way that Oakland A’s General Manager, Billy Beane, put together his team using the unconventional thinking of saber-metrics as opposed to the opinion of scouts who have been around the game their entire lives.

Beane's way of thinking was against the grain in many ways. His hiring of Paul DePodesta (who in the theatrical version is named Peter Brand, and is played by Jonah Hill) helped mold his way of thinking about how to build his club. The two of them thought that the most important way to win a baseball game was to score runs. You can't score runs without men on base, and thus they went after guys with high OBP (on-base percentage).

Sounds like the perfect way to market a movie right? That would only be correct if nerds like me were the only ones hitting the theaters. Throw in Brad Pitt and it may expand your audience by roughly 1000%.

Anytime you are adapting a movie from a well read book you have your work cut out for you. For anyone who has read the book you will be surprised at the lack of the depth that the movie goes in to. Part of that is of course because this is a Hollywood film and not a 3 hour documentary for the MLB Network. They had to find a way to make this commercially viable. With that will come some creative license, I don't blame them one bit for that. I do, however wish that there would have been more of a sense of reality involved in this movie. Obviously my day job reflects heavily on the way I saw this movie. I have seen the way some of these things happen (coincidentally with some of the players portrayed in this movie). While I obviously wasn't in the room, I'm thinking that Billy Beane's trade proposals to land Ricardo Rincon took just a hair longer than it did for Brad Pitt to make the deal.

My expectations were probably a little too high going into the theater today. I was hoping this would be an all-time classic. I was let down. That's not to say this wasn't a good movie. It is worth checking out, just don't expect it to be a walk-off home run.

It's more of a ground rule double.


Moneyball
Directed by: Bennett Miller
Written by: Steven Zaillian, Aaron Sorkin, Stan Chervin, and Michael Lewis
Starring: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman
My Rating: 3.25 out of 5
Would Gene Pick it?: Yes