Will Sorg-

Moneyball, if you can believe it, is about baseball and economics. Your dad probably loves this movie – and for good reason. It has the king of the actors your dad likes: Brad Pitt. On top of that, it’s written primarily by Aaron Sorkin, writer of The West Wing, A Few Good Men, and more dad-related media. Here’s the interesting thing: I do not like sports movies or economics, and I am not a father. However, Moneyball manages to make me like all of those things out of pure dad movie energy.

Moneyball won me over by being more about the process of sports rather than the actual action. Of course, some high-stakes baseball games are being shown, but the majority of this film plays out in offices, locker rooms, and practices. The movie follows Billy Beane and Peter Brand as they use statistics to overhaul the Oakland Athletics baseball team. Beane was the first professional league general manager to utilize this strategy and as a result, he essentially put his career on the line for this new strategy. Beane himself was a failed major league player and the movie plays off of Beane’s feelings of inferiority.

The film is heavily focused on Beane’s past and the way it influences his management style. Beane as a character even shifts the way the movie is made. During the baseball sequences, we barely ever see the whole stadium and instead, we are fixed on small pockets of the crowd and fieldside action shots that feel very divorced from the stadium. This is consistent with following Beane’s perspective as he is barely in attendance at the games. Rather, his focus is largely on the less romanticized aspects of the sport: the business and the judgment calls.

This makes for a very unconventional movie experience where we are never really given the big third-act game with all the climactic moments coming together. Instead, because we are put into the perspective of the general manager, it feels like each game throughout the season is a life-or-death scenario. The tension that comes from winning a game becomes less about the game itself and more about all that is riding on the nine innings.

At its core, the movie is about seeing potential in the unconventional. Seeing as Beane and Brand’s strategy of team building is utilized by almost every major league team nowadays, you can guess how successful the technique was. However, throughout the movie, it seems that the whole plan is considered unusable. Beane is threatened with being fired constantly and in many ways, it feels like his character is forced to relive his disappointment as a former baseball player over and over each time he doesn’t quite meet expectations. In my opinion, this is why the film’s core message really works. Each choice for the Athletics’ roster is considered undesirable and doomed to fail, yet it is proven that each one of them is being undersold by the league. The movie may be a lot of boardroom talk and the sports version of technobabble, but there’s still that powerful feeling that the film is urging the audience to go for the unconventional in life, that potential is in everyone, and going against tradition can change an entire culture. Even if that culture is specifically a sports culture.