Moneyball is Going to be Awesome.

There’s a zero percent chance this movie sucks. Michael Lewis’ Moneyball was already a fantastic read, and Lewis also wrote The Blind Side (which I totes loved, as did America). I love baseball, and I love looking at undervalued assets. The one misconception people have about Billy Beane is that he only uses sabermetrics and thinks scouts are dumb. Neither are true. Scouts are valuable, but relying solely on eyes to evaluate talent is flawed. He combined traditional scouting with statistics to help find players that would work in his system. Also, Beane didn’t really use sabermetrics; he just focused on On-Base Percentage, which led to runs, which led to wins. While the market was focusing on RBI and HomeRun guys, he focused on guys drawing walks and getting on base.

It’s less about being smarter than people by using advanced statistics, and more about being financially thrifty and focusing on assets that were tremendously undervalued (like how defense has been pretty underrated lately).

Brad Pitt is Beane, and it’s pretty perfect. My one qualm is that Jonah Hill is playing a fictional character who is based on Paul DePodesta. They make faux DePo fat, awkward, and super nerdy. That’s not the case in real life, but what would Hollywood be without its over-the-top stereotypes!

For realsies, though, this movie is going to be fantastic. September 23rd.