Moneyball

At one point in Moneyball, as the Oakland A’s are in the midst of their historic 20 game win streak, there’s dialogue about baseball is a romantic sport. I would contend no other sport inspired the romance that baseball does. Football is too violent, hockey too obscure, and basketball too cool. But baseball has this way of worming into the zeitgeist when something amazing happens, like a home run record or an unprecedented winning streak. Moneyball, in a weird way, celebrates that romance, although without showing much of anything on the field. Moneyball is about a man who was hamstrung with a tiny budget and wanted to devise a way to maximize every dollar spent by assembling a motley crew of castoffs based on mathematical formula instead of baseball’s tradition of intuitions. It celebrates the triumph of not just building a winning team, but how baseball can make nobodies into winners. Maybe it’s the baseball fan in me talking — I’d watch baseball before any other sport — but I just loved the story here. It made the memory of the streak come rushing back, and now for a while, you could find A’s fans everywhere, because it was history in the making. I love movies that can do that, so this just spoke to me.