Moneyball the Movie: Starring Brad Pitt?

It seems so many years ago that Billy Beane, the club's 1st round pick in the 1980 draft, was the "next big thing" for the Mets. He and Strawberry (the overall #1 pick in 1980) were to anchor the lineup for a decade.

So many expectations, so much promise, so little result...his career fizzled and he was soon out of baseball as a player.

Then a funny thing happened along the way...Billy Beane found religion, though in this case the religion had numbers as their God.

As all baseball fans know, the metamorphosis of Billy Beane was chronicled in one of the great baseball books of all-time, "Moneyball", by Michael Lewis.

That book is now set to become a movie--that's right, a movie--and none other than Brad Pitt is considering signing on to play Billy Beane.

MTV Movie Blogs reports:

It’s a busy day for Brad Pitt! Variety reports the star is in talks to play the lead in “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” a movie based on Michael Lewis’ non-fiction book. “Devil Wears Prada” helmer David Frankel is attached to direct, and Steve Zaillian (”Schindler’s List,” “Gangs of New York”) has signed on to pen the script.

Lewis’ book is centered around Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, who faced the difficult task of trying to assemble a major league team with one of the smallest budgets in baseball. Beane decided that, in the race for the biggest and most expensive players, no one was really doing their research. With the help of some computer geeks, he gathered vast amounts of statistical data, crunched it with sophisticated computer-based analysis, and assembled one heck of a team.

If you’re wondering how number crunching can be an engaging movie, reviews of the book suggest it’s full of the underdog players and against-it-all odds that make fictional baseball movies so popular with audiences.

There’s no telling when this might film — a glance through Pitt’s IMDB page show that he has three films in pre-production already, plus he’s in the midst of filming Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.” (Yes, they’ve decided to spell it that way.) Here’s hoping it doesn’t fall off his busy slate — surprisingly, Pitt has never done a sports movie before. And doesn’t it seem like a genre tailor made for him?