Moneyball is a 2011 film starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, centered around baseball, statistics, truthful events, comedy, and beating unbeatable odds. Pitt’s character Billy Beane is the general manager of the Oakland A’s (a major league baseball team). After a devastating loss, Beane is faced with the departure of three talented players and the pressure to replace them with players who are just as good. Beane then meets Peter Brand (Hill), an economist from Yale who’s passionate about using the statistics of professional athletes to predict successes. The two pair together to build an incredibly successful baseball team with an unconventional mix of players, based on statistics. On Rotten Tomatoes the film has a critic rating of 94%.
I’m not usually into sports movies but Moneyball felt completely different. Instead of watching the fall and subsequent rise of a specific player or of a coach guiding his team, Moneyball had an interesting perspective of watching the general manager. The movie is also incredibly well produced with great cinematography, which makes watching it more of an experience rather than just watching the movie for the plot alone. If you’d like to watch an inspirational, critically acclaimed movie with passionate actors, seamless production, and a fairly fast storyline, I would recommend Moneyball, even if you aren’t typically a fan of sports movies. I also learned way more about baseball and baseball statistics than I ever thought I would, and I wasn’t bored at all with learning it.