Perhaps the only thing more unlikely than Michael Lewis’s journalistic take on the statistically-driven transformation of the small market Oakland A’s turning into a major bestseller is the eventually film adaptation, which had its own torturous path to completion, standing as one of the most entertaining efforts of the year. Moneyball is undoubtedly a baseball movie. Some of its supporters insisted that it wasn’t, emphasizing the other plot threads that took place away from the cramped confines of ballpark offices, such as the main character’s relationship with his daughter. Otherwise, they’d point to the broader applicability of the themes: the David and Goliath conflict, the slow turn change of a deeply entrenched culture, the painfully current challenge of the once prosperous making due with less. That’s all true and and every bit of it undoubtedly factors into the film’s artistic success. But what makes Moneyball truly smashing is the way it’s deeply, apologetically entrenched in the sport and business of baseball. There may not a single scene this year that I enjoy more heartily than Billy Beane and his Assistant General Manager Peter Brand working the phones with fierce, raucous exuberance on the day of Major League Baseball’s trading deadline, jointly taking predatory pleasure in the art of the deal practiced at the speed of an ace hurler’s fastball. As with everything else in the film, director Bennett Miller structures this scene with a controlled, concerted refinement, certain that he needs not pause to arduously explain what’s going on to the audience because plain observation will fill in any gaps the uninitiated might have. As Beane, Brad Pitt is as good as he’s ever been in his career, building a character who is driven by his edgy bullheadedness to innovate with borrowed ingenuity. Maybe unsurprisingly, he connects in deep, potent ways with a man whose abundant natural gifts are starting to fray just enough that he has to reinvent himself with a newly forged creative and intellectual fortitude.