Hi, this is Dana Steven Slate's movie critic here with the Slate spoiler special podcast on Moneyball, the new movie starring Brad Pitt about baseball management.

Joining me from the DC Slate office is Josh Levine. Hi, Josh.

Hey, Dana.

You are the executive editor of Slate. So important. And the host of Hang Up and Listen, Slate's sports podcast.

I am. Thank you. And I'm very happy to have a sports person come and talk about this movie with me because otherwise I think you know about my sports dyslexia, right? I've talked about it on the culture gab fest before. I do. You not only don't like sports. You don't like games of any kind. Yeah. And I think it's beyond not liking. It's not so much disliking is really just

feeling almost like a learning disability that I can't seem to follow along and care enough to

get through a game of anything. Although I will say that if there's any sport, I do understand the

basic rules of and don't mind having it unspool in front of me. It is baseball. But nonetheless,

I'm going to throw it to you to talk about Moneyball, the book that

it's based on, and just briefly outline the plot before we get into spoiling. So Moneyball is based

on a best-selling book, nonfiction book by Michael Lewis, who's actually published in Slate before,

right? Michael Lewis has written for us before. For sure. He has. So Moneyball is about Billy Bean,

the general manager for the Oakland

Athletics. He's still the manager, general manager of the team now. He has. Yeah, he's been there

for more than a decade now. And he kind of revolutionized the way that baseball teams think

about how to construct their rosters, which players to pick. And the book is about

the A's finding these undervalued players. And it sort of brings in these ideas from the business

and financial worlds about undervalued assets. And so the A's, this small budget, small market team,

is able to compete with the Yankees of the world by finding these players that nobody else

wants, but that they should want. And so the movie, in what may be a work of condensation from

the book, I'm not sure you'll have to tell me, makes it look as if this was a decision that was

arrived at at a certain point in 2001 when Billy Bean played by Brad Pitt in the movie loses a bunch of

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