While not the masterpiece that some critics are making it out to be, Moneyball is a darn good baseball movie, one that eschews traditional diamond-based heroics or comedy for a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the process of how a team is built.

Moneyball celebrates the idea that it isn’t the star players who create team success, but rather a group of athletes whose fundamental skills, aggregately mixed and blended together for optimum performance, that can lead to victory.  The heroes of Moneyball are general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and player analyst Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), who strive to understand and manipulate the raw data that their players generate to gain advantages on the field.  Their use of sabermetrics in the early 2000s has led to a shift in how teams analyze their talent, and thus how baseball teams (and lineups) are constructed.

I’m not sure if I buy everything that this movie (based on Michael Lewis’ same-titled book on Beane’s methodology) says about how much better statistical analysis works over traditional methods.  I think plenty of baseball scouts over the years have fully understood that getting on base leads to runs, which leads to victories.  Like the old scouts that Beane stops listening to, I believe that there are intangible factors that the statistics simply do not reveal.  But it’s hard to argue with success, and it is undeniable that what Beane and Brand began has revolutionized how players and teams are analyzed.

Moneyball focuses on Beane as its center, putting his reputation on the line when he can find no other way to overcome a low team payroll, taking a chance on Peter Brand’s belief that they can build a team with players other executives undervalue. The players are given short shrift for the most part, with catcher-turned-reluctant-first baseman Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt) receiving the most attention as the human symbol for Beane and Brand’s gamble.

The film’s most notable sequence is “The Streak,” when the 2002 Oakland A’s ran off a remarkable string of twenty consecutive victories, setting a new record in the process.  This streak is really the culmination of the sabermetric theory, the visual proof that the gamble did work, that a bunch of no-name players — like “an island of misfit toys,” as Brand famously puts it — can be, for twenty consecutive games, the best that every played together.  Baseball fans already know the outcome of the story, and Billy Beane is still in Oakland, still striving to make magic with a team that will never have the payroll of the Yankees or Red Sox.  Moneyball argues very convincingly that such magic is waiting to be found (and already has, by other teams that have adopted heavy statistical analysis).  ✰ ✰ ✰.  30 Sept. 2011.