In theaters this weekend is Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robin Wright.

Moneyball is based upon the true story of Oakland A’s general manager, Billy Beane, and his successful attempt to stay within the smallest budget in the league, yet still put together a winning team.

Beane gets together with computer geek, Peter Brand, a Yale economics major and full time computer nerd, portrayed by Jonah Hill. They gather together statistical data on a computer where they analyze every player and place a values upon the skills and characteristics that will benefit the team.

Having lost some great players and knowing that they cannot possibly replace them for the amount of money that they have to work with, the computer generated team fits into the budget yet still allows them the opportunity to put together a winning team.

Beane was one of the first in baseball to actually embrace computer technology and how it can mix up and separate the data with algorithms to actually use the raw data to analyze the possible players.

Even though this is a movie about baseball, it seems that you don’t necessarily need to know anything about baseball to enjoy the movie and it becomes a movie more about the people, Billy Beane, Peter Brand and Art Howe, the stressed out Oakland A’s coach, who is not so sure he can handle the stress of recruiting players in the new way. It is a movie more about management of the sport than the playing of the sport. For all of you who asked, NO you CAN NOT download free movies that are copyrighted which includes this one.

So far reviews have been excellent. Rumor has it that Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill are both at the top of their game in this movie. Seems like a great movie to check out. It hits theaters on Friday, September 23, 2011.

Moneyball was based upon the 2003 book by Michael Lewis, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game”.