Touchdowns and homeruns; practically being born right smack into Cricket, whatever real-world education we have on baseball and football (aka Rugby to us), comes from two sources: a steady crop of feel-good Hollywood films (mostly in time for November/December’s pre-Oscar run) and whatever small helping that used to air on sports channels. The brief exposure did one little thing: it helped us understand the bare-necessities of the sport.

So far American sports films have been easy to understand, at least in literal depth. About nine times out of 10, the focus is on an underdog team, and its lead protagonist, who shifts through a similar potpourri of issues – personal, sentimental and professional – by the time the end credits roll.

Moneyball, which opened recently in the United States, and has no chance of appearing on Pakistani screens, focuses on the inevitable cliché’s of a sports film: the rise of a bottom-of-the-barrel team with the story based on a non-fiction book in recent history. The screenplay’s take, however, establishes something uncannily new to the genre: rather than stick to score-boards, sweaty-palmed players and play-by-plays, we tune our heads to statistical numbers of dejected, faulty players.

The film, Moneyball is a fictionalised look at the Oakland Athletics from 2001 to 2003, and how its general manager, Bill Beane, battled to pull a losing team out from the rut. There are many problems that he faces: the player line-ups aren’t working, they don’t have the money to acquire bigger players and they’ve lost three of their stars. “The problem”, Beane informs his scouting staff in one scene “is that there are rich teams and the poor teams, and then there’s 50 feet of crap… and then there’s us”.

Desperate times and plain old luck gets him Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) – a young pudgy stats genius, fresh from Yale, who is keen on utilising a theoretical formula of sabermetric (statistical analysis of baseball based on objective evidence) logarithms by Bill James. Moneyball, as the theory is called, means structuring a team on bargain basement – and sometimes defected – players, with faded careers in hopes of utilising just one of their oft neglected talents. For example, if the player is a runner, but stinks at catching, keep him away from catching.

Moneyball, the film, would have been a disaster if it didn’t have the following components: Brad Pitt, who plays an incarnation of Bill Beane; the heavily adapted screenplay by the brilliant Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin. The film is based on a non-fiction book (of roughly the same title) authored by Michael Lewis. And Bennet Miller has directed it. Everyone else, including a stringently curbed Phillip Seymore Hoffman, is secondary.

As Beane, Pitt slips into his usual quintessential performance mode. He doesn’t bypass the role and never under steps it. The most threatening we see of him is when he throws two temper tantrums – once by throwing a chair out of the office, and the other by destroying a water cooler in the team’s changing room. As Beane has no romantic entanglements – and as far as the film went, no social life – his only spec of sentimentality comes from his daughter Casey Beane (Kerris Dorsey), who lives with her mother Sharon (Robin Wright) and worries about him whenever her screen-time allows. To introduce added weight to his character, we often cut-away to a younger Beane, who in the late 70’s went pro-baseball, leaving behind a Stanford education – a devil’s deal he still regrets.

At times Miller tries his hardy-best to shake the shackles of contemporary sports film direction by focusing on long, close-ups of Pitt’s side-profile, once too often; maybe to shake off the scare that Moneyball will turn into an all-talk picture. He needn’t have bothered.

Released by Columbia Pictures, Moneyball is rated PG-13. A few cuss-words here and there. Expect a nomination or three during the award season.