One thing for sure: Brad Pitt is an A-list actor, and like all of them, they pick roles because they are either challenging, or because the character is something we haven’t seen before. Billy Beane is certainly an iconic figure in baseball circles, but he’s not much of a celebrity in the grand scheme. Still, there’s something to this role that not only caught Pitt’s attention, but kept him attached to the project despite director and script changes. He currently shooting a movie and has 26 (!) other projects in development. I would think if you have 26 other movies you want to make and you’re running into roadblocks making the goofy baseball movie, you’d ditch the project unless there was really something to it. You can almost make a similar case for Philip Seymour Hoffman playing Art Howe. Unless these guys are huge baseball/A’s fans, there’s something attractive enough to the story that inspired Pitt and PSH to play these characters.

Movies like Jerry Maquire and Major League were fictional comedies, and in Jerry Maguire, we had the dramatic story with the characters which had a resolution which was satisfying. In MoneyBall, no such outcome exists.

Incidentally, when did Ybor City become the Mecca for Scientology?