Baseball Movies: The top 5 characters ever? Who are yours?
By Rick Soisson
Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) in Moneyball (2011): A somewhat underrated actor, Brad Pitt, turns in a masterful performance as the tightly wound general manager of the poverty-stricken Oakland Athletics in their record-setting 2002 season.
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It was a season that changed baseball, portraying the coming explosion in analytics as desperate measures used to do great things. At least early on in their implementation.
Pitt plays a guy so stressed out by watching his team that he doesn’t. He works out instead, his character’s way of handling the intensity that had doomed him as a player.
Among all MLB film characters, he is maybe an even more fully developed character than Costner’s Crash Davis, who’s quite fully sketched in.
Pitt’s Billy Beane is a guy who’s also willing to think outside the box in order to win despite his stress, and a man unafraid to wield the power he actually has to fire backward-thinking scouts and hire an important nerd to help him make the A’s winners.
His portrayal of the GM’s relationship with his young daughter also adds just the right touch of sentiment to a story of a man determined to make his mark in baseball one way or another. The film definitely captures the spirit of Michael Lewis’ excellent book about that person at that time.
Next. Rockies: Hawpe played his role in WS year of '07. dark
You can’t go wrong in attending to any of these MLB film characters. They’re all parts of films many consider quite good. Just add some salty snacks for Field of Dreams, which is a bit too sweet. You’ll eventually get to Moonlight Graham.