‘Moneyball’ is authentic to the core, not an easy task for a sports movie and especially not if is about America’s national passion – baseball. The movie opens with historic footage of a 2001 Oakland A’s game against the Yankees. Immediately we are swept into the euphoria that accompanies the sport.

The cast of the movie is superbly chosen. The screenplay by Steven Zailian and Aaron Sorkin is remarkable, (story by Stan Chervin) and in the hands of director Bennett Miller (Monster Ball), becomes an inspirational story and a great modern parable.  Moneyball is a complicated story examining our values; what we value as success and what we see as failure, how we use it to measure ourselves, and others. It is about looking at ourselves and seeing if what we see is what we aspired to see. Moneyball is based on the book ‘Moneyball: The Art of Wining an Unfair Game’ 2003 by Michael Lewis which examines the use of Sabermetric analytics in sport and is about Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s.

Moneyball has an all star cast: Brad Pitt as the Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane, a real life character upon whom the story is based; Philip Seymour Hoffman, Manager of the team; Jonah Hill (Peter Brand) plays a young Yale grad with an expertise in economics and a completely new way of evaluating a baseball team’s performance, and of course, the team. The team has an impressive selection of actor/athletes including Chris Pratt and Stephen Bishop. The story also includes Billy’s family; ex wife (Robin Wright) and 12-year-old daughter (Kerris Dorsey) who both add a vital dimension to the story.

Billy Beane, “…there are rich teams, there are poor teams and then 50 feet of crap, and then there is us”.

Major League Baseball had become a very unfair game.  In 2001 the harsh reality in baseball was that if you could not afford to buy the superstars and to hold onto them once their potential became evident, your team would continually be ‘gutted’ and the chances of significant wins never going to happen. This is a demoralizing situation. It marginalizes players, managers and teams who are not superstars or who are relegated to the bottom of the pack because they are poor. Moneyball is based on the true story of a man’s (Billy Beane) determination to beat the odds and change the game of professional baseball. Billy Beane is faced with trying to build a winning team with a budget that is far too insignificant to really have a chance.