After a few roster changes, Sony Pictures’ baseball film, Moneyball, enters the box office game led by Brad Pitt as the marquee player. Based on a true story, Pitt portrays Billy Beane, a former ballplayer who never met expectations before switching to the business side of the sport as the general manager of the Oakland A’s. Heading into the 2002 season, he faces a daunting situation: his small-market Oakland A’s have lost their star players (again) to big market clubs (and their enormous salaries) and is left to rebuild his team and compete with a third of their payroll. 
Beane’s methodology to remain competitive is to go against the grain. He takes on the system by challenging the fundamental tenants of the game. Looking outside of baseball, to the dismissed theories of Bill James, Beane hires Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a brainy, number-crunching, Yale-educated economist working for the Cleveland Indians. Together they take on conventional wisdom with a willingness to reexamine everything and armed with computer driven statistical analysis long ignored by the baseball establishment.
Billy Beane
Beane and Brand’s vision emphasize going after players overlooked and dismissed by the rest of baseball for being too odd, too old, too injured or too much trouble, but who all have key skills that are universally undervalued (thus can be signed comparatively cheaply). As Billy and Peter forge forward, their new methods and roster of misfits rile the old guard, the media, the fans, and their own field manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who refuses to cooperate.
Ever since reading the best-selling book by Michael Lewis of the same name, Brad Pitt was determined to portray this fiercely competitive middle-aged family man, driven by a desire to win – and perhaps, even more importantly, reinvent himself despite the long development process that went into extra innings.
“Moneyball is a classic underdog story,” says Pitt, who also serves as a producer of the project. “They go up against the system. How are they going to survive, how are they going to compete? Even if they do groom good talent, that talent gets poached by the big-market, big-money teams. And what these guys decided was, they couldn’t fight the other guy’s fight, or they were going to lose. They had to re-examine everything, to look for new knowledge, to find some kind of justice.”
“In many ways, Billy’s going up against an institution – one that many smart individuals have dedicated their lives to,” says Pitt. “The minute you start questioning any of those norms, you can be labeled a heretic or dismissed as foolish. These guys had to step back and ask, ‘If we were going to start this game today, is this how we’d do it?’ A system that has worked for 150 years doesn’t work for us – I think that’s applicable to the moments of flux we’re experiencing today.”
The film project had gone through assorted writers and directors at various stages of development including Steven Soderbergh. The helmsman that eventually teamed up with Pitt is Bennett Miller. Miller garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Director with his debut film, “Capote” (also featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman who won an Academy Award for the title role). 
“I wasn’t interested in the tropes of sports movies, ‘says Miller. “ I’d rather not end a film with a hero carried off on the shoulders of teammates in a stadium where fans are screaming their heads off, champagne corks flying, trophies, fireworks, and all of that. I prefer the quiet triumphs, that might not burn as bright but deeper and more lasting, where you see someone struggle internally and then come out the other side to realize something has changed within them.”
Miller adds, “We saw the movie as a classic search-for-wisdom story – I think there’s something thrilling about people relinquishing long-held, conventional, conformist, universal beliefs. It gets really exciting when there are personal consequences to it. On the surface, he’s trying to win baseball games, but beneath it all, there’s something he’s trying to work out. That is a timeless story.”
Certainly there are some pretty talented writers that are credited with the Moneyball screenplay these Oscar-winners Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin have interesting takes on how the film is more about redefining the very picture of success in a broader sense that circling the bases after a game-winning homer. The focus is on Beane’s inner drive to succeed – not just for himself but for all the guys who had wound up on the margins of baseball.
Zaillian (“Schindler’s List”, “Hannibal”) was attracted to the conflict that inevitably comes when someone tries to rock the boat. “Trying to change any venerable institution always leads to the same things: suspicion, fear, contempt and condemnation. This, along with the collision that results, is the central theme in Moneyball. It’s the central theme any time, in any field – art, science, industry, politics, sports – when someone has, and acts on, a new idea.”
Adds Sorkin: “I don’t think Moneyball is any more about Sabermetrics than The Social Network is about coding. Tired of losing and not having the resources to win conventionally, he takes a chance on a very unconventional strategy.”
The director and producer/star share the feeling that their picture has used the sport as a backdrop to a deeper exploration of risk and the meaning of success.
“I like that you have a character who takes a risk not just to make something of himself, but more so to understand something about himself,” Miller explains. “On the one hand this is a true sports drama, but Billy is trying to do something more meaningful than simply win baseball games – whether he understands that or not.”
“The film is about how we value things,” Pitt explains. 
“How we value each other; how we value ourselves; and how we decide who’s a winner based on those values. The film questions the very idea of how to define success. It places great value on this quiet, personal victory, the victory that’s not splashed across the headlines or necessarily results in trophies, but that, for Beane, became a kind of personal Everest. At the end of the day, we all hope that what we’re doing will be of some value, that it will mean something and I think that is this character’s quest.”
Miller says the consequences come up in the questions Beane faces – which, ultimately, are questions we all must face: “How do you compare the value of one thing to another, of one person against another, of the choices in your life?”
