Moneyball

Moneyball tells the true story of Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics.  He’s a former major league player himself, but never lived up to the potential that he was believed to have.  His playing career failed, yet he eventually became a manager.  He achieved much more fame as manager due to his very different style of managing.  The film starts off by informing the viewer of how certain baseball teams, such as the New York Yankees, are given way more money than other teams.  When Billy Beane took over as manager of the Athletics, they had one of the lowest budgets of all baseball teams.  The Yankees were able to buy their best players away from them with ease.  So Beane began to use a new ideology of recruiting players that he could afford.  Instead of focusing on their batting average or home runs, he would put value on them that other recruiters overlooked; he would look at how often the players got on base and how many runs they scored, even if this was achieved simply through getting walks.  There’s nothing flashy about getting walked in baseball, it just shows you have a good eye to not swing at bad pitches – but you’re still getting on base.
Brad Pitt plays Beane, and Jonah Hill plays his assistant, Peter Brand.  Beane hires Peter after seeing him at work with another team.  He’s impressed by his knowledge as a player analyst.  It’s from Peter that he learns this new way of looking at players and finding value in them even if they’re not considered financially valuable at the time.  Peter was an economics major at Yale and is able to provide insight that others in the business don’t have.  The two of them seem to take an accounting type of approach to recruiting that differs greatly from what everyone else is doing.  The current recruiters are all very turned off by the manager’s new style of finding players and that he puts such importance on new hire Peter Brand.  But he’s simply trying to change the game and how things are done.  This is the essence of the entire film.
The relationship between Beane and Brand is what makes it work.  The two of them seem to have a great chemistry together considering that they have very different personas.  And Jonah Hill proves that he’s capable of taking on dramatic work as opposed to the comedies that he’s most recognized for.  But the movie tries to be much bigger than it really is.  It acts as if it’s trying to show when the game of baseball was changed forever when it really wasn’t.  It just shows one manager attempting a different method of putting a team together – and if you’ve followed Billy Beane’s work with the team in real life you’d know that this hasn’t led to any real success.  It’s still a well-made film though; it just aims higher than it really needs to.

http://www.examiner.com/movie-in-philadelphia/danny-porcaro