'Moneyball' is a Pitt success

In 2001, a General Manager of a small-market baseball team found a new way of doing things. He sought to challenge the conventional wisdom, defying one hundred fifty years of tradition.

Being crucified by the media and ridiculed by the game he sought to win in, he became a pioneer, the man who broke the barrier between the old order and new era of baseball thinkers who seeked to win an audience among the game's elite. His name was Billy Beane.

"Moneyball" is a drama film based on the best-selling book of the same title by Michael Lewis, directed by Bennett Miller.

The Screenplay was written by Aaron Sorkin and Steve Zaillian, who have received awards both for their work in the past on movies such as the Social Network and Schlinder's List. The movie was featured at the Toronto Film Festival.

The movie is about Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt, general manager of the Oakland Athletics, a major league baseball team who had one of the lowest payrolls in baseball in 2001, yet over the course of two years, became the most winning team baseball, setting the single season record of most consecutive wins in 2002.

In the Movie, Beane realizes that after the loss of a few of his key players, he must find replacements.

After looking to trade with the Cleveland Indians, Beane recruits the help of Peter Brand, played by Jonah Hill, a Yale graduate in economics, who is a statistics whiz and a disciple of Bill James, a baseball statistician.

He shows Billy Beane a computer program which he wrote that analyzes baseball stats to come up with more objective conclusions about players, which according to Brand, to win games he must buy runs by playing guys who take more pitches than they swing and buy discarded players, or "Misfit toys", to come up with a team that produces more runs than any organization.

Jonah Hill plays Peter Brand, which is based on the real life character of Paul Depodesta, then-assistant GM of the Oakland Athletics.

Hill portrays Brand as a quiet, number-crunching, often underhandedly hilarious assistant of Beane's, whom Beane uses throughout the movie as a human stat reference.

Though Hill plays in mostly comedies, his portrayal of Brand was a more serious role. He played as Brand as a science-driven journeyman who uses his statistical findings as his sword and shield.

Billy Beane was played by Brad Pitt, who did a brilliant job in his portrayal of Beane. He played Billy Beane as exactly how Michael Lewis portrayed him in the book.

The movie describes his acts as General Manager, his front office bravado and his life off the field as a divorced father who wants to spend time with his daughter, played by Kerris Dorsey.

It also depicts his butting of heads with his manager Art Howe, who is played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who refused to accept the system that Beane was trying to implement, thus causing Billy to trade his players so Howe had no choice but to play along with the Billy Beane show known as the Oakland Athletics.

 The movie often shows Beane alone, driving in his car and working out in bowels of the Oakland Coliseum, appearing to his organization as confident though when he is alone insecure about the decisions he has made as a player and as a GM to compete with larger budget teams, dealing with the widespread criticism of his organization by the media.

The movie that show some scenes of him as a young ballplayer who signed of high school by the New York Mets, explaining some of his insecure behavior, known to throw chairs and a cornucopia of dugout objects.

 "Moneyball" is a classic. It is not just baseball, but more about human nature and those who break new ground and rocked the world as a cause of it.