No jock schmaltzfest like “Field of Dreams,” the whip-smart “Moneyball” is a crowd-pleasing baseball movie for people — like me — who don’t like baseball movies. 
 
 Thanks to sterling work by the odd-couple team of Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, and a razor-sharp script by Oscar winners Aaron Sorkin (“The Social Network”) and Steve Zaillian (“Schindler’s List”) — as well as understated direction by Bennett Miller — this is probably the finest baseball movie since “Bull Durham” back in 1988. 
 
 That was another film where the intensely boring-to-watch sport was largely benched in favor of sharp dialogue and well-drawn characters. 
 
 Looking more and more like his mentor Robert Redford in middle age, Pitt knocks it out of the park. He’s wonderful as the superstitious Billy Beane (he refuses to watch his team’s games), who reinvents the hidebound sport in the early part of the 21st century in league with a young statistician out of Harvard Business School. 
 
 Beane worked his way up the scouting ranks to general manager of the Oakland Athletics after flaming out as a player for the Mets, who signed him out of high school. As the film opens, Beane watches as his team loses to the Yankees in the 2001 playoffs. 
 
 Worse, the well-heeled Yanks have the money to lure away Beane’s three free-agent star players from the Athletics, a relative shoestring operation. 
 
 In this compelling adaptation of Michael Lewis’ “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” Hill’s number-crunching statistician Peter Brand (a fictionalized version of the real-life Paul DePodesta, now assistant general manager of the Mets) uses numbers to show Pitt how he can build a winning team for a relative pittance by employing a controversial system called sabermetrics. 
 
 By focusing on on-base percentages rather than gold-standard batting averages, Beane and Brand sign up misfits, injured players and aging stars — such as former star David Justice (Steven Bishop), acquired from the Yankees at a steep discount — who have enough juice in them to propel them into the playoff again. (Although the Justice trade didn’t exactly happen that way, it’s one of several instances of acceptable dramatic license.) 
 
 This radical approach to the game is derided by Beane’s aging, tradition-oriented scouting staff — Ken Medlock is especially memorable as the most vociferous of these dinosaurs. 
 
 They can’t stop Beane, but he hits a major roadblock with his surly manager Art Howe — wonderfully played by Philip Seymour Hoffman (who Bennett directed to a Best Actor Oscar in Bennett’s only other film, “Capote”) in a few strategic scenes. Howe flat-out refuses to use their most unorthodox acquisition, Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), a first baseman who literally could not throw a baseball because of an injury. 
 
 Beane finally gets his way through a labyrinthine series of deals — the film’s best sequence and a great example of how a good director and screenwriters can throw a lot of information at the audience and make it stick (as Sorkin did in “The Social Network”). 
 
 While there are glimpses of Beane’s minimal private life — he has a daughter (Kathryn Morris) and an ex-wife (cameo-ing Robin Wright) — most of the movie takes place in locker rooms where Beane and Brand plot together on an unlikely scheme that ultimately resulted a record 20-game winning streak. 
 
 Pitt and a slimmed-down Hill (very effective in his first non-comic role) have terrific chemistry together. It’s a triumphal save for Bennett, who was called in as a relief director after Steven Soderbergh left before shooting started because of creative differences. 
 
 “Moneyball” brilliantly proves the old maxim that it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. In this case, though, the game isn’t necessarily baseball. 
 
 lou.lumenick@nypost.com ||||| Winning isn't everything, voracious Vince Lombardi used to say, it's the only thing. But what if Lombardi was wrong? What if other things mean more, last longer, have more significance than victories, not only in life but also in the particular lives of the people who play the games?This is the heretical premise of the thoughtful and entertaining "Moneyball," based on the equally iconoclastic bestseller by Michael Lewis. Starring Brad Pitt in top movie star form, it's a film that's impressive and surprising.It's a surprise because "Moneyball" is that rare sports movie that doesn't end with a rousing last-second victory or a come-from-behind celebration. Fittingly for a book its author calls "a biography of an idea," it deals not only with wins and losses but also with the quixotic quest of a man who wanted to revolutionize a sport, someone who was willing, in Lewis' words, "to rethink baseball: how it is managed, how it is played, who is best suited to play it, and why."That man was Billy Beane , charmingly played by Pitt, the provocative general manager of the Oakland Athletics whose unconventional ideas about what a team with limited resources could do to compete with profligate powerhouses like the New York Yankees continue to infuriate the sport's traditionalists. It's not for nothing that "Moneyball" starts with a quote from Yankees star Mickey Mantle : "It's unbelievable how much you don't know about the game you've been playing all your life.""Moneyball" is also a surprise success because this has been a famously troubled production, one on which Sony pulled the plug just before shooting was to begin despite having Steven Soderbergh set to direct from a script by Steven Zaillian. The project should have died right there, but Pitt, who must have had a sense of how good a role this was for him, refused to let it go. With Aaron Sorkin aboard as co-writer and Bennett Miller shrewdly installed as director, the film unexpectedly flourished.Miller, whose only previous features are the subtle, nuanced "Capote" and a documentary , has a restrained but dead-on storytelling style that is an ideal counterpoint for a tale set in the emotional, volatile world of professional sports. He's a filmmaker who knows how to make stories involving without overstating them, and, like Billy Beane, he sees value in situations others might miss."Capote" won a lead actor Oscar for Philip Seymour Hoffman (who returns here, letter-perfect as Oakland Manager Art Howe), and Miller's focused style once again creates an atmosphere where actors can flourish. Chief among these is Pitt, who does wonders with a role of a good guy in a tough space, a man who combines the confidence and charisma of the former professional athlete Beane is with an unexpected questioning nature. This is low-key star power at its best.Pitt, of course, does not do it alone. Aside from Hoffman, he has an ideal foil in an unexpectedly dramatic Jonah Hill , who makes the perfect odd couple complement to Pitt's Beane as the awkward, pudgy Peter Brand, a computer geek who studied economics at Yale but eats baseball statistics for breakfast and ends up as Oakland's assistant general manager.The actors and director Miller have the benefit of a strong script that feels seamless despite having had both Zaillian and Sorkin work on it. (Stan Chervin gets story credit.) Though it departs at times from the way things happened -- Brand is a fictional character because Oakland's real assistant general manager, Paul DePodesta, later with the Dodgers, refused to allow his name to be used -- the screenplay has great pungent dialogue and a strong sense of drama that couldn't have been easy to distill from Lewis' discursive book."Moneyball" begins on Oct. 15, 2001, with Beane's Oakland team in serious trouble: It's losing the American League division series to the much wealthier Yankees. The A's general manager gets more bad news when he meets with the team owner. Not only are the A's relinquishing one of their top players to the Yankees via free agency, but there is also no money to replace him.As Beane runs a meeting with his scouts and player development people (several of whom are played by real-life weathered baseball veterans), the general manager is a picture of frustration. Because the A's are one of the sport's poorer teams, they can't buy their way out of trouble. "We got to think differently," Beane insists, but just what would differently mean?Beane gets a hint when he meets young Brand, then working for the Cleveland Indians , who introduces the general manager to the world of sabermetrics, a statistical analysis of baseball pioneered by Bill James. The notion is that traditional ways of looking at player value have led to individuals being misjudged, to some players being overvalued and, most important for the A's, to others being undervalued and thus available for poor but enlightened teams to purchase."Moneyball" sets off this inside baseball stuff with segments about Beane's private life, about his failed marriage ( Robin Wright plays the ex-wife) and his tenuous relationship with his young daughter (a very fine Kerris Dorsey). Most critically, the film takes us back to Beane's own odyssey as a professional player, showing how the past was prologue to actions he takes in the here and now.Once Beane, a nervy guy who believes in wheeling, dealing and rolling the dice, gets James' system in his blood, the great fun of "Moneyball" begins as we watch Beane and Brand assemble, in classic "Seven Samurai" fashion, a team of unwanted players. People like Scott Hatteberg ( Chris Pratt ), a catcher whose overall baseball abilities Beane valued so much that he changed him into a first baseman because Hatteberg could no longer throw well enough to be behind the plate. ||||| Mr. Miller, largely shaking off the official art-house pretensions of his breakout feature, “Capote,” takes all this seemingly dry, dusty, inside-baseball stuff and turns it into the kind of all-too-rare pleasurable Hollywood diversion that gives you a contact high. He still has his serious, or rather too-serious, side: he bookends the story with ophthalmologically close shots of Billy’s eyes shining in the dark, as if soliciting you to peep into the windows of a soul that, as much as any man’s or woman’s can be revealed, emerges through the script and Mr. Pitt’s fully inhabited, appealingly barbed performance. There are some overhead shots of the A’s emerald field too, including one of a large American flag being unfurled, that feel like the efforts of a director needlessly looking for big symbolic moments, perhaps particularly post-Sept. 11. 
 
 He needn’t have bothered. The movie and its meaning are already there, in the details (the ugly rooms, the uglier clothing), the performances and especially in the emphasis on process and how teams and players are built and broken, saved and discarded. What works in “Moneyball” is showing not telling: the scenes of men doing and being and sometimes failing, as in the interwoven flashbacks to the young Billy, played by Reed Thompson. There’s an unnecessary Sorkin-sounding lecture toward the finish that explains what you already know; for the most part, though, the screenplay obscures huge chunks of exposition through the radio chatter of announcers and listeners. And it gives Mr. Pitt, who hurtles through the movie, a chance to scat like a juiced-up Ella Fitzgerald, working his phones and seemingly every other general manager in the country, as he transforms a new baseball philosophy into action. 
 
 It’s hard to imagine anyone but Mr. Pitt in the role. He’s relaxed yet edgy and sometimes unsettling, as in his testy exchanges, bristling with tamped-down fury, with the A’s manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman, wearing a head of peach fuzz and a scowl). Though Mr. Miller holds onto the romance of baseball that Mr. James and others helped strip away (this is, after all, a tale of winners and losers), Billy doesn’t really change: he just becomes his perfect self. When he first goes after Peter, he moves in like a shark. Initially Peter can’t look Billy in the face, and when they talk, Peter keeps dropping his eyes, like the plain girl who can’t believe the hottest guy at school is even talking to her. But he is. 
 
 “Moneyball” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Locker room chatter and cussing. 
 
 MONEYBALL 
 
 Opens on Friday nationwide. 
 
 Directed by Bennett Miller; written by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, based on a story by Stan Chervin and the book by Michael Lewis; director of photography, Wally Pfister; edited by Christopher Tellefsen; music by Mychael Danna; production design by Jess Gonchor; costumes by Kasia Walicka Maimone; produced by Michael De Luca, Rachael Horovitz and Brad Pitt; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 13 minutes. 
 
 WITH: Brad Pitt (Billy Beane), Jonah Hill (Peter Brand), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Art Howe), Robin Wright (Sharon), Chris Pratt (Scott Hatteberg), Stephen Bishop (David Justice) and Reed Thompson (young Billy). ||||| For me, the only thing duller than watching baseball is listening to fantasy-baseball freaks drone on about stats. So I yawned at the idea of Hollywood taking on Moneyball, Michael Lewis' exhaustive 2003 bestseller about how the Oakland Athletics learned to stop worrying about star salaries and love the bottom line. 
 
 My bad. Moneyball is one of the best and most viscerally exciting films of the year. Yes, director Bennett Miller dials down the on-field action and goes stats to the max. But he laces his investigative fervor with emotional punch. Moneyball is a baseball movie like The Social Network is a Facebook movie, meaning it isn't. Both are about how we play the game of our lives, and the excuses we make in the name of winning. 
 
 First up is Brad Pitt, at the top of his live-wire game as Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's. Beane takes a major step in 2001 when the A's lose first baseman Jason Giambi because they can't compete with the cash-rich Yankees. Instead of wallowing in low-rent despair, Beane gets his geek on and tries being cost-effective. 
 
 As Beane's geek of choice, enter comedy wonderboy Jonah Hill, who scores a no-joke knockout as numbers cruncher Peter Brand. Don't look up Brand on Wiki. He's not there. Brand is a composite character, a young disciple of Bill James, a pioneer of sabermetrics. SABR, for Society for American Baseball Research, attracts rebels who think outside the box, measuring a player's performance beyond batting average and popularity, putting value on solid performance and getting on base. 
 
 Timeout here for a movie-geek analogy: Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig cash in with Cowboys & Aliens while the movie strikes out. Less well-known actors topline The Help and steal home. That's some delicious irony, seeing $20 million man Pitt (reportedly working cheaper here) repping a movie about dumping overpaid stars. 
 
 Pitt more than earns his keep. He stuck by Moneyball through two directors before Miller, who hadn't worked since 2005's acclaimed Capote (what's up with that?). David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada) dropped out. And Steven Soderbergh – Pitt's director in the Ocean's trilogy – had the plug pulled by Sony just before shooting. Ouch! No doubt Moneyball's sabermetrics lack the tear-jerking pow of Lewis' page-to-screen crowd-­pleaser, The Blind Side, but Pitt felt Moneyball was a story that needed telling. Despite narrative bumps, the finished film impressively bears him out. 
 
 The dynamite script is credited to Steven Zaillian (Schindler's List) and Social Network Oscar winner Aaron Sorkin, whose sharply witty touch is everywhere. Pitt's golden-boy luster fits Beane, but the actor goes deeper by revealing a man haunted by his early decision to turn down a Stanford athletic scholarship to sign as an outfielder with the Mets and see his promising career crash, though it prepped him well as a GM. Pitt nails every nuance, including Beane's complex relationship with the two people who care about him the most: his ex-wife (Robin Wright) and their daughter (Kerris Dorsey). 
 
 Still, Moneyball scores highest with the catches it makes on the fly. Beane won't even sit still for a game – he'd rather hear about it on his car radio. So we watch him go, go, go: Beane inviting Brand to his first meeting with hardened scouts who look like they'd happily bludgeon the kid and his laptop; Beane on the phone negotiating a life-or-death trade with a fake cool only Brand gets to see crumble; Beane nurturing Scott Hatteberg (the excellent Chris Pratt), an injured catcher he reinvents as a first baseman; Beane presiding over a 2002 season that includes a 20-game win streak. Best of all, Beane mixing it up with manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Hoffman, an Oscar victor for Miller's Capote, is a joy to watch, a study in stoic resistance as Beane tries to run rings around him. 
 
 Props to Miller for making us feel the heat in finding value in things others miss. Late in the film, Beane gets seduced (like he did with the Mets) with a job offer from the Red Sox. Miller lays Boston's Fenway Park before him like a green blanket of temptation. The gifted cinematographer Wally Pfister (The Dark Knight) makes the atmosphere inviting enough to inhale. Is Beane a coward for sticking with the A's? The GM still has no World Series victory to his credit, and sabermetrics are now so prevalent that Beane can't claim an edge. But Moneyball left me ready to cheer. Here's a major-studio movie fired up with rebel spirit. Working a tight budget to make every minute count sounds like a plan – for baseball, Hollywood and beyond. 
 
 Related 
 
 • Video: Brad Pitt Makes Baseballs Stats Exciting in 'Moneyball' 
 
 • Peter Travers' Fall Movie Preview
– Moneyball is a big hit with critics, even if its premise—a film about baseball statistics—might sound boring at first. Here’s what they say about the film, which stars Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill: Built on a "sharp, sleek script," Moneyball "takes all this seemingly dry, dusty, inside-baseball stuff and turns it into the kind of all-too-rare pleasurable Hollywood diversion that gives you a contact high," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "No jock schmaltzfest, the whip-smart Moneyball is a crowd-pleasing baseball movie for people—like me—who don’t like baseball movies," writes Lou Lumenick in the New York Post. In the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan agrees, calling it "that rare sports movie that doesn't end with a rousing last-second victory or a come-from-behind celebration." Pitt is "in top movie star form," he adds. In short, it’s "one of the best and most viscerally exciting films of the year," asserts Peter Travers in Rolling Stone.