I have not seen a movie that made me stop cold in my seat in a very long time. I was completely amazed that the new Brad Pitt movie, Moneyball, did just that. (Also, I’m totally gonna flex my baseball knowledge muscles with this post. If baseball ain’t your thing, skip a few paragraphs. I’ll explain why you’ll like this movie, too.)

Moneyball is the true(ish) story of how Billy Beane changed the sport of baseball. The movie opens at the end of the Oakland A’s 2001 season. They lost game 5 of the first round to the damn Yankees who had the highest payroll in all of baseball. During that off-season, the A’s lost their three top players, Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, and some other dude that I’ve never heard of before so I don’t really care that I forgot his name. All three were given HUGE sums of money to leave the A’s. And the A’s? Well, they had the lowest payroll in all of baseball.

Billy Beane (Pitt) was charged with building a winning team with just pennies. Previously, good teams were essentially bought. You have guys who on the surface play well, hit home runs, looks pretty. They become the face of the franchise and as a result, get paid a lot of money. But after meeting with and talking to Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a baseball statistician, Beane realized they were looking at the wrong qualities in players.

Beane threw out the old way of scouting players based on surface qualities, and started getting players based on their statistics. In baseball today, there seems to be freakin stats for everything under the sun. Shoot, there’s a stat out there that essentially shows a player’s worth. It tells how many points overall that player cost the team, or added to the team. SHEESH! But back in 2001, stats were just something to look at, but not study, and certainly not build a ball team around.

With this new tactic and new team, the A’s went on to have an American League record 20 wins in a row and they got themselves into the playoffs again. (Honestly, these aren’t spoilers. This is a true story. You can find the record pretty easily online, so don’t give me any crap about ruining the movie for you.) (And while I won’t reveal exactly how they did in the playoffs, I will say that as a Minnesota baseball fan, it was a great ending )And they did it all with the very lowest payroll in baseball.

**Non-baseball fans, start reading here!**

This movie? Was awesome. I was expecting it to be good based on some of the reviews I’d read, but I was NOT expecting the high caliber cinema I was presented with. This wasn’t a baseball movie, despite all evidence to the contrary. This was a movie about management, about taking risks, learning from your mistakes. There was about 10 total minutes of actual baseball playing in this movie. The movie was about the story of the A’s management in 2002 and how playing the game of baseball was changed.

And the cinematography? Seriously. I was astounded. You know in dramatic parts in movies, there’s the dramatic music which is how you know something dramatic is happening? This movie didn’t have that. Instead, in dramatic parts there was complete and utter silence. Your focus was solely on what was happening on the screen. It was so quiet in that theater. Everyone was captivated. No one even rustled their popcorn bags or took a sip of pop. You could have heard a pin drop. My heart? Was racing. I’d never been so invested in a scene in a movie like I was right then.

Director Bennett Miller took what could have been a boring, documentary-like movie about the front offices of a baseball team and turned it into a captivating story that can hook even the most casual of baseball fans. Not since Field of Dreams have I seen a baseball movie this awesome (and I didn’t end up a snotty, bawling mess at the end like I do when I watch Field of Dreams!).

Now, when I said this was a true(ish) movie, what I meant was the director took some creative licence with the story. For more, here’s Tim with the explanation about the way the manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), was portrayed:

Real-life Oakland manager Art Howe had some objections to how he was portrayed in Moneyball. For example, in one scene, Billy Beane is shown telling reliever Mike Magnante that he’s been cut. In real life, it was Howe who had to tell him that – just two weeks before Magnante was to become eligible for a full pension. Also, Beane is shown telling his players himself what the new strategy would be – keep taking walks, don’t try to steal bases, etc. These are instructions that would have been given to the manager to tell the players. Howe didn’t like that strategy – he felt it flew against baseball tradition, which was kind of the point – but he followed it.