Billy Beane (Brad Pitt, left) and Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) share a vision on how to build a baseball team that runs counter to prevailing wisdom in Moneyball. 

The business of baseball -- a topic of non-interest for many -- is the basis for an amazingly captivating adventure in Moneyball, the story of how the Oakland Athletics fundamentally changed the way baseball players are evaluated and teams are assembled in 2002.

Brad Pitt is terrific as Billy Beane, general manager of the Athletics, who decides to take an analytical approach to building a team after he loses three top players -- Jason Giambi, Jason Isringhausen and Johnny Damon -- to other teams willing to pay them extraordinary salaries.

The low-budget A's can't afford those salaries, so with the help of recent Yale economics graduate Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) and a lot of computer time, Beane begins to use ideas developed by seminal baseball sabermetrician Bill James to identify and sign undervalued players — who might look awkward but manage to get on base and help the team in unglamorous ways -- instead of paying big bucks to players who move elegantly and have high batting averages, a knack for stealing bases and "good faces.”

This doesn't sit well with scouts, media analysts, armchair critics, or even the A's surly manager Art Howe (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), who fights Beane every step of the way.

But Beane -- portrayed with strength and confidence by Pitt as a promising player who gave up a full scholarship to Stanford to play for the Mets, washed out, then took on the game's front office -- is no quitter, and the battle to prove the effectiveness of his method is every bit as thrilling as the competition on the ball field. 

The film, directed by Bennett Miller (Capote), is rated PG-13 (for language) and has a running time of 133 minutes. 

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