Rated PG - Rotten Tomatoes freshness score 94%, Popcornmeter 86%, IMDB rating 7.6/10
Synopsis:
Moneyball's opening screen has a quote by Mickey Mantle that reads, "It's unbelievable how much you don't know about the game you've been playing all your life."
Professional baseball is an unfair game. Why? There is no team salary cap, meaning that there are rich teams that can afford to lure the best players to their rosters, and there are poor teams that can't. In 2001, the Oakland A's were the third poorest team in the league, and after they lost the ALDS series to the NY Yankees, the richest team in baseball at the time, the A's top players were hired away by richer teams. That's when Billy Beane, the A's General Manager realized that he had to do something different if the A's were going to have a chance to complete the following year. He and Peter Brand, a young Yale graduate with a degree in economics, use statistics to identify undervalued players that other teams overlook in an effort to put together a winning team with the salary available to them. They call this approach Moneyball, and, if it works, they could change professional baseball.
Thoughts:
The funny thing about this being a favorite movie of mine is that I'm not even a baseball fan. I am, however, a fan of a great story. And Moneyball is a great true story.
Also, you might think that this is just a Brad Pitt vehicle, but it doesn't play that way to me. I think he does a fantastic job portraying Billy Beane, and conveying the story of the A's in the early 2000s.
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