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Beane and Peter Brand (Hill) focus on just one thing: OPS, or “on-base plus slugging” percentage, the sabermetric statistic that best describes a player’s ability to score runs.ĭepicting more than just the clash of old vs.

The veteran scouts - depicted as crusty, chaw-spitting geezers - talk the “same old good-body crap,” judging players by how they look, who they date and how they behave off the field. On film, Miller manages to explain it by flashing equations and spreadsheets beneath dialogue anyone can grasp. In reality, that makes for a lot of math.

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The problem becomes how to assemble a winning team on an impossibly small budget the solution involves rethinking how baseball scouts evaluate players. It’s nearly all talk, as Beane copes with losing to the New York Yankees in the 2001 playoffs and seeing rich teams poach the A’s three most valuable players - Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon and Jason Isringhausen. What “Moneyball” doesn’t do is waste a lot of time on the field. As in “The Social Network,” he takes conversations that have no business being entertaining and leaves us hanging on every word. Without comparing drafts of the screenplay, it would be tricky to say where Zaillian’s contributions end and Sorkin’s begin, and yet there’s no mistaking the latter’s touch for electric dialogue. Surely the irony isn’t lost on Steven Soderbergh, who developed Zaillian’s script in a more avant-garde direction, which would have blended documentary-like interviews with dramatic re-creations.Īnd yet the result - which puts the focus back on Beane (Brad Pitt) and the Ivy League-educated wunderkind (Jonah Hill) who helped him rewrite the rules - is plenty artistic with “Capote’s” Bennett Miller at the helm. Whether or not Hollywood wants to admit it, there’s an undeniable parallel between big-studio economics and Major League Baseball, in which the big guys in both fields are split when it comes to making decisions: Old-timers do it for the art, basing their judgments on gut instincts and years of tradition, while a new class of business-school grads crunch the numbers, using statistics to make smart bets.

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