Let me preface this article by stating I know next to nothing about baseball and I still love Moneyball. Judging by its 94% Rotten Tomatoes score it seems plenty of leading critics do too.
Newly added to Netflix, one of the best streaming services, it's a tense sports drama that blends number crunching with human stories and is all the better for it. It's not just changed the way I play Football Manager but also how I look at sports as a whole. The unpredictable nature of sports and cold hard calculations are not traditional bedfellows, but this is the true story that changed everything.
Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane (in what might be a career-best performance) the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics (known as the "A's"), one of the smallest teams in the whole of Major League Baseball. After another season of coming close but not quite, his star players are poached once again by the bigger names who can offer more money. Fed up with being an also-ran but also lacking the funds to buy fresh talent, he seems stuck. An encounter with a young analyst with no baseball background (Jonah Hill) changes his entire philosophy for the team, but for those around him, the old ways are the best ways.
Interestingly enough we don't actually see too much baseball being played either, with Beane himself refusing to watch the games for fear of jinxing the team. The heart of the film is centred around locker rooms and player trades which may not sound enthralling but with a script co-written by The West Wing's Aaron Sorkin, the dialogue in each scene absolutely sings.
Beane's conflict between getting the know the players on a human level, and the drive for statistical perfection is a fascinating balancing act. You could be laughing with a player about his family and then trade him away to the other side of the country the very next day for someone you've never met but who "Gets on base."
With Foxcatcher director Bennett Miller at the helm and a stellar supporting cast, including a baby-faced Chris Pratt and the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman, Moneyball is undoubtedly one of the best sports movies of all time.
