Moneyball

It seems to me that baseball is a part of the national spirit in the USA, a summer activity ingrained from school days, a sport whose stars assume the mantle of heroes. Our equivalent in Australia would be cricket but unlike Major League Baseball in the USA, cricket at the highest levels in Australia is not club based. We have baseball too but for us it is a minor sport so the events and baseball references in Moneyball are mostly unfamiliar.

That is not to suggest that the themes in Moneyball fail to register here. They do register and very well too; in our case with football. We have our own minnow clubs, battling for funds and struggling to keep pace with the wealthy clubs whose spending power enables them to gorge on the players the poorer clubs develop and to dominate competitions. Long suffering supporters of the Cronulla Sutherland Sharks (NRL) and the North Melbourne Kangaroos (AFL) would surely empathise.

In Moneyball, the General Manager of the Oakland A's baseball club, well portrayed by Brad Pitt, turns to an unknown young statistician to build a side from the inexpensive discards and has-beens of other clubs. This is based on a true story and luckily for us in Australia one that is largely unknown so that the eventual outcome remains to be discovered; an outcome that proves slightly unpredictable.

Despite the plentiful unfamiliar baseball references Moneyball proved an unexpectedly entertaining drama.