Moneyball (2011)

Moneyball is a sports movie, but you do not have to love baseball to love it. It tells the true story of Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt. Beane was a high school baseball star who never quite clicked in the big leagues and became the general manager of the 2001-2002 Oakland A’s, a small market team with a small market budget. The film opens with them losing their three biggest players. The team cannot win a championship, compete financially, and is losing momentum. Fast. Beane is good at what he does but his budget is too small for the quality of his work to make a difference. He has a team of scouts who are old school baseball and it is dawning on him that the old way of doing business is going to leave the A's near the bottom of the American League West, with no hope in sight. Beane stumbles upon young Yale graduate, Peter Brand played by Jonah Hill. Brand, a composite character based on Bean’s actual consultants, uses a system called saber-metrics to turn recruiting baseball players into an equation, replacing intuition with statistics and numbers. Beane and Brand calculate a seemingly laughable team, with no support from the other scouts, who are set in their old-fashioned ways, superstitious, and are wary of new trends (one memorable scene has them discounting a player because his girlfriend isn't pretty enough for them--what man with enough confidence to be a big league baseball player would date a 6?). Despite disagreements with the team manager Art Howe, played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who doesn’t realize the genius of Brand’s math, Beane and Brand’s method establishes a legacy. You don't have to be a long time movie watcher to figure out early on that they are going to have success--but it is not over-the-top success. Other teams, teams with bigger budgets, pick up their methods and use them to their success. But the process that Beane went through to make the decision to turn down a college scholarship to Stanford and go directly to major league baseball--for the money--taught him something, and he uses that to chose things that matter to him over money. It is a good lesson, hidden in the folds of a sport film.