Inside Baseball: Moneyball's good, but the A's still aren't

Baseball fans will definitely enjoy "Moneyball," even if it's - like practically every American studio film these days - about 30 minutes too long, but will others like it, too? Probably to a degree. It's strength is the inside look at baseball management, seen through the lens of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), GM of the struggling Oakland A's, who enlists help of young tech whiz baseball scholar (Jonah Hill) to use stats to make the team the best it can be with limited $. I didn't know till after watching it that Aaron Sorkin was one of the writers, but the whole way through I was thinking about Social Network: both films are about insider/corporate/executive life, lots of scenes of bargaining and so forth around a table, both build a hero who's against the system, smarter than everyone else, a bit of a loner. In some ways, Moneyball is even the better picture - it's a nice twist on the old baseball/sports yarns that the victory at the end is partial and ambiguous. Sorkin's dialog is always good; Pitt has become a better actor with almost every film, though I think the script makes him too heroic/flawed, doesn't fully acknowledge that his theories are a bit crackpot and that he needs some kind of expertise from his scouting corps to run a ballclub. Some pop psychology stuff seems very thin, and his relation with daughter shoe-horned in it seems to give movie wider appeal (won't work). Jonah Hill excellent in one of his first (?) serious roles. I loved all the inside baseball stuff but not sure of its veracity - I would doubt that a GM makes a trade on the basis of a 20-second phone call, with no consultation - but snap decisions like that do add to the pace of the drama.