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I'f they'd tried to stick to the book they couldn't have made a movie. I never understood what they thought they were doing.
(Lewis, "The Inside Story")
Moneyball, the 2011 film about Oakland A's General Manager Billy Beane and his 2002 team, directed by Bennett Miller, written by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin and starring Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, seems, in spite of itself, to do much of the critical and cultural work we associate with sports cinema, particularly the inspirational sports movie. In fact, Brad Pitt has said that what drew him as both actor and producer to Michael Lewis' 2003 work of business journalism, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, was its status as "a story about our values: how we value other people. What we value as success, what we value as failure. How we take that value system and understand our own value. How that value system is warped and prejudiced" (qtd. in Lee). The adaptation of Moneyball asks how are we being required to rethink the underlying assumptions of the inspirational sports movie and the collective cultural myth from which it emerges in the context of the new epistemological model presented by "moneyball."
"Moneyball" refers to the objective study and analysis of baseball using sabermetrics, employing statistics to determine a player's current value and to predict future development and success.1 Sabermetrics has its origins in the acronym for the Society for American Baseball Research. It often questions the conventional models of analyzing a player's worth to his team in terms of scoring runs, such as using runs batted in (RBI's), deeming them inaccurate (in the case of RBI's, for instance, more depends on whether there are men on base to be batted in in the first place, rather than on the individual batter's skill). Bill James is considered the most important figure in sabermetrics due to his series of books entitled Baseball Abstracts, which he published from 1977-1988, although statistics have been part of the game since the 19th century. James has worked for the Boston Red Sox since 2002. It was Sandy Alderson, former General Manager of the Oakland Athletics (A's), who brought sabermetrics to the team. Alderson's work was continued by Billy...