I have never liked baseball. The farthest I made it as a baseball player was kindergarten tee-ball, and the only success I had was building dirt castles in the outfield. “Moneyball” made me question my dislike of baseball.

Barrett Miller’s film is an adaptation of Michael Lewis’s book of the same name about Billy Beane and the 2002 Oakland Athletics. Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt, is the current general manager of the Oakland Athletics, one of the poorest teams in Major League Baseball or, as Beane says in the film, “there are poor teams. Then there’s 50 feet of crap. And then there’s us.”

The film chronicles the unlikely rise to success of the Athletics; a team built not on superstars and multimillion-dollar contracts, but a whimsical list of washed up and supposedly flawed players. The ragtag team of winners, that at one point won twenty games in a row, was developed by Beane using a theory known as sabermetrics, which is based on empirical data for baseball, and not the number of superstars taking the field.

Pitt’s performance is outstanding, and it would not be surprising to see his name on the list of Oscar nominees for Best Actor next February. Aaron Sorkin’s script is sharp and witty, and Pitt uses his lines to develop Beane as a complex character. Flashbacks of Beane’s troubled career as a professional baseball player help to show him as a man living vicariously through the success and failure of his team. At the surface, Beane is confident of his abilities as the general manager, but throughout the film, his confidence ebbs and flows and the viewer sees him question his abilities as the leader of a struggling franchise.

One of the strongest scenes in the film takes place in Beane’s kitchen, where his 12-year-old daughter asks Beane if he is going to lose his job. The A’s are in the midst of a losing streak, and Beane’s philosophy of sabermetrics appears to be a failure. Beane reassures his daughter that he has no chance of being fired, but the fear in his eyes is evident.

Pitt makes “Moneyball” the fantastic film it is, but Jonah Hill is the perfect complement to him. Hill, notorious for his comedic roles in films like “Superbad” and “Get Him to the Greek,” reprises much of his humor as nerdy baseball junky Paul Brand, a fictional version of Beane’s assistant general manager. Beane and Brand are two very different characters, but their eccentricities work well together.

“Moneyball” is not a normal sports movie. It puts aside the clichés that are so often found in sports films and creates a character-driven film that delves deep into the minds of the athletes and managers of the Oakland Athletics. It is a story of personal struggle and the ability to overcome the immense challenge of playing what Beane so aptly refers to as, “an unfair game.”

Moneyball

Rating: 4 out of 4 stars

Starring: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill

Runtime: 126 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13