Baseball. America’s National Pastime, and a complete mystery to everybody else (ok, ok, apart from some Cubans and some Japanese). So here’s a two-hour film about it: Enjoy! Moneyball tells the story of Oakland Athletics general manager Bill Beane, and how he used statistical analysis and a value-for-money approach to assemble a team of relative misfits that went on the longest unbeaten run in the history of professional baseball. Bear with me, I promise there’s interesting stuff ahead. Beane (Brad Pitt) has just had a hugely successful year with the A’s but, with the smallest budget of any Major League Baseball team, all of his best players jump ship for bigger, better contracts. Tasked to replace them, he ends up looking for players at the Cleveland Indians and stumbles upon an advisor to his Indians counterpart whose role he can’t quite figure out. This advisor has a name, Peter Brand … There’s more →