Baseball movies usually end in the bottom of the ninth inning, with a hitter ready to redeem himself, or his teammates, or perhaps democracy itself, with an unlikely home run that wins the championship.

Moneyball is not that movie.

This is a baseball story that’s less about game winning hits and more about people willing to challenge the establishment.

The challenge sounds somewhat arcane its heroes posit, for instance, that on-base percentage is a more telling statistic than batting average but you don’t have to be a fan to understand what’s at stake. Well, democracy itself, actually.

It’s based on the true story of Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team, who tried to change the old ideas held by the stodgy experts, mostly because it was all he could afford.

This combination of economics and sports makes Moneyball a quintessentially American movie, helped along by the fact that Brad Pitt still the reigning sex symbol of Hollywood cinema turns Beane into a seductive character, if only by virtue of his winning smile. You want to believe in him, because everyone else is so old and cranky.

Moneyball begins with the 2001 championship series, in which the wealthy New York Yankees beat the low-budget A’s. Afterward, three of the A’s best players were lured away with big contracts (including Jason Giambi to the Yankees and Johnny Damon to the Red Sox). As Beane says, it’s as if the A’s were organ donors to richer teams.

In the boardroom, scouts talk about replacing their ex-stars with new players who have the usual skills not just high batting averages, but confident demeanours and attractive girlfriends but Beane has other ideas.

He’s both a winning and difficult man, so tightly wound that he can’t actually watch the games. He listens on the radio, turning it off frequently so he can catch his breath.

He does this with more regularity than the players catch anything at all: Among his signings is sore-armed catcher Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), who is converted into a first-baseman whose greatest fear is that a ball will be hit his way.

Hatteberg is part of a grand experiment. Beane realizes that a team with a modest budget can’t compete unless it finds new ways of doing things. He discovers a similarly quirky innovator, a theorist named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), who graduated in economics from Yale University, and together they try to remake the fundamentals of the game.

Moneyball thus becomes a buddy comedy, the story of the relationship between a former golden boy (Beane was a promising player himself) and his unlikely assistant, who says what the A’s have to do to compete is “find value in players that nobody else can see.”

Brand chunky where Beane is fit, socially awkward where he is confident is talking about himself, as well, of course, and the men form an offbeat pair who baffle and anger the old-time baseball people with their new ideas of statistical analysis.

The film is based on a book by Michael Lewis about Beane’s new brand of baseball, which is still being played out. Screenwriters Aaron Sorkin, who tackled a somewhat larger cultural earthquake in The Social Network, and Steven Zaillian, add a family drama (Beane is divorced from Robin Wright’s character Sharon, and is building a relationship with his teenage daughter) but the film is most interesting when he is practising his brand of fast-dial telephone trading or bumping heads with the baseball men.