Michael Lewis' Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (published in 2003) tells the true story of the Oakland Athletics and their player-turned General Manager, Billy Beane. Specifically, it tells the story of how Beane and his assistants crafted the Athletics with a very constrained budget and with parts from the proverbial "scrap heap" (i.e. players who were undervalued and cheap) with the goal of creating a team that wins games and ultimately, wins the world series.
When it was released, Moneyball received very positive reviews. Publisher's Weekly absolutely loved the book, saying that "[Lewis'] descriptive writing allows Beane and the others in the lively cast of baseball characters to come alive."
Eight years after the book released, a film adaption of the same name was released. Directed by Bennett Miller and starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, Moneyball received almost uniformly positive reviews and was a modest financial success, grossing $110.2 million against a modest budget of $50 million. Esteemed critic Roger Ebert loved the film, calling it a "smart, intense and moving film that isn't so much about sports as about the war between intuition and statistics."
