On the Beat: Moneyball at the Movies by John Perrotto

Scott Hatteberg was like so many other people in baseball, as well as fans, when word started coming from Hollywood in 2008 that Moneyball was going to be turned into a movie. "I really wondered how it was going to be done," Hatteberg said. "It was a great book, but the subject matter was very dense. I just didn't see how a screenplay could be adapted from the book." Michael Lewis' bestseller about how Athletics general manager Billy Beane used advanced statistical analysis to find market inefficiencies and build a playoff team on a low budget has become one of baseball's seminal books. However, from a movie standpoint, it seemed to have all the making of a documentary instead of a cinematic production. There was neither sex nor violence in Moneyball, and there was no romantic interest or a particularly happy or sad ending. The conflict was between Beane's new age thinking and the old school thinking of manager Art Howe, his coaching staff, ...