History YMMV / Moneyball

** Peter Brand is treated as a prodigy whose statistical knowledge of the game gives him an advantage over older scouts and brass who go by traditional stats and the "eye test". Brand was mostly based on then-executive Paul [=DePodesta=] (who asked to be a composite character), who after the success of the A's was hired to be the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. His run was short-lived and mostly a failure; although the 2004 Dodgers won the division in the first year of his stewardship, his frugal roster build in 2005 led to the second-worst record the Dodgers have ever posted in their Los Angeles tenure, resulting in his firing, and eventually bouncing around the league in assistant roles before leaving for a job with the NFL's Cleveland Browns (who are generally considered one of the worst teams in the NFL).

** The Moneyball principle became so widespread in TheNewTens, with more Ivy League grads as general managers, front offices not paying established veterans in lieu of cheaper free agents, and every team having entire departments devoted to analytics, that the sport has come under fire as a result, being perceived as less fun and active as opposed to how it used to play. With sabremetric staples such as working counts, a de-emphasis on bunts and stolen bases ("I pay you to get on first, not get thrown out at second"), and using statistics to "platoon" lineups rather than have a traditional everyday starting eight in the field, people inside the sport and out have lamented computers running the game rather the manager, and baseball devolving as a whole into what is referred to as "Three True Outcomes" baseball, where most at-bats now result in strikeouts, walks, and home runs, resulting in fewer balls in play.

* WTHCastingAgency:
** The 5'11" Creator/BradPitt playing the 6'4" Billy Beane.
** While Creator/JonahHill's character is allegedly a CompositeCharacter, he is pretty undeniably based on real-life Oakland A's executive Paul [=DePodesta=]. Which makes the casting kind of funny, as [=DePodesta=] is a rather slim, svelte guy who, in spite of his reputation as an uber-nerd, actually played baseball and football in college. There were plenty of rueful comments in the press and among baseball fans about Beane getting Brad Pitt and [=DePodesta=] getting Jonah Hill.

** As of the 2021 season, the A's are actively exploring leaving Oakland, having been ordered to look around by the commissioner's office after years of being unable to secure a deal for a replacement of the Coliseum. There's still a chance they stay in the city, but it doesn't look particularly promising, and Las Vegas looks like their likely future home.

* AmericansHateTingle: Unsurprisingly, the only markets where the film performed well other than the US was Japan and Korea. Anywhere else in the world, ''Moneyball'' was a complete bomb, as it covers baseball, a sport that virtually doesn't exist outside those three countries (plus Canada and a few smaller Latin American countries). In fact, Japanese and Korean revenue made ''over half of total international revenue''. Said all that, it's still [[OverlyNarrowSuperlative the best performing baseball movie]] when it comes to non-US markets, carried there almost entirely by the names in the cast. Unsurprisingly, it was at least still popular, especially on streaming for people interested in sports in general.

** Peter Brand is treated as a prodigy whose statistical knowledge of the game gives him an advantage over older scouts and brass who go by traditional stats and the "eye test". Brand was mostly based on then-executive Paul [=DePodesta=] (who asked to be a composite character), who after the success of the A's was hired to be the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. His run was short-lived and mostly a failure; although the 2004 Dodgers won the division in the first year of his stewardship, his frugal roster build in 2005 led to the second-worst record the Dodgers have ever posted in their Los Angeles tenure, resulting in his firing, and eventually bouncing around the league in assistant roles before leaving for a job with the NFL's Cleveland Browns.

** Peter Brand is treated as a prodigy whose statistical knowledge of the game gives him an advantage over older scouts and brass who go by traditional stats and the "eye test". Brand was mostly based on then-executive Paul [=DePodesta=] (who asked to be a composite character), who after the success of the A's was hired to be the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. His run was short-lived and mostly a failure; although the Dodgers won the division in the first year of his stewardship, his frugal roster build in 2005 led to the second-worst record the Dodgers have ever posted in their Los Angeles tenure, resulting in his firing, and eventually bouncing around the league in assistant role before leaving for a job with the NFL's Cleveland Browns.

* The depiction of Jeremy Giambi's hard-living ways in light of Jeremy's suicide in 2022.

* UnderminedByReality: The film attempts a BittersweetEnding, with Billy turning down the Red Sox's 12.5-million dollar contract to stay with the A's and his daughter, content to know that he's changed the game for the better, and being told that he's "hit a home run but just doesn't know it yet". However, as any baseball fan would tell you, in real life things for Beane and the A's would go downhill right after. All of the large market teams would proceed to copy Beane's sabermetrics strategy, leaving the A's back where they started and struggling to compete with the richer teams. In 2016 Beane would be KickedUpstairs by the A's ownership after years of missing the post-season and ''still'' not making it past the first round of the playoffs, and in 2021 it would become public that the A's were looking to leave Oakland, seemingly proving that such a small market team like the A's couldn't compete even with Moneyball.
* WTHCastingAgency: The 5'11" Brad Pitt playing the 6'4" Billy Beane.
** While Jonah Hill's character is allegedly a CompositeCharacter, he is pretty undeniably based on real-life Oakland A's executive Paul [=DePodesta=]. Which makes the casting kind of funny, as [=DePodesta=] is a rather slim, svelte guy who, in spite of his reputation as an uber-nerd, actually played baseball and football in college. There were plenty of rueful comments in the press and among baseball fans about Beane getting Brad Pitt and [=DePodesta=] getting Jonah Hill.

** While Jonah Hill's character is allegedly a CompositeCharacter, he is pretty undeniably based on real-life Oakland A's executive Paul DePodesta. Which makes the casting kind of funny, as DePodesta is a rather slim, svelte guy who, in spite of his reputation as an uber-nerd, actually played baseball and football in college. There were plenty of rueful comments in the press and among baseball fans about Beane getting Brad Pitt and DePodesta getting Jonah Hill.

* HarsherInHindsight: Several of the A's Beane was praised for signing in the book were later implicated in the Mitchell Report, issued following a US congressional investigation into doping in baseball. Most notably, Jason Giambi.

** Some baseball fans snarked about the movie's timeliness considering the A's had recently fallen into a string of mediocrity [[note]] including the 2011 season when the film was released, the A's had gone five years without a winning record; amusingly, the Texas Rangers made the World Series twice in that span with manager Ron Washington, who is depicted as Beane's allied bench coach with Oakland in the film [[/note]] and Billy Beane's roster strategy being called into question. After the film's release, the A's revived their ''Moneyball'' success by winning their division the next two seasons (2012-13), a division that features two rival teams who were among the six highest payrolls in baseball.

** The Co-Owner of the Oakland Athletics is played by Bobby Kotick (CEO of Creator/ActivisionBlizzard) in a cameo role at the start of the film, wherein he repeatedly tells Billy Beane that the team simply doesn't have any money. Considering that Kotick's massive salary and bonuses have become large talking points within the realm of video games, his protests about how little money the team has come across as laughable.

* UnderminedByReality: The film attempts a BittersweetEnding, with Billy turning down the Red Sox's 12.5-million dollar contract to stay with the A's and his daughter, content to know that he's changed the game for the better, and being told that he's "hit a run run but just doesn't know it yet". However, as any baseball fan would tell you, in real life things for Beane and the A's would go downhill right after. All of the large market teams would proceed to copy Beane's sabermetrics strategy, leaving the A's back where they started and struggling to compete with the richer teams. In 2016 Beane would be KickedUpstairs by the A's ownership after years of missing the post-season and ''still'' not making it past the first round of the playoffs, and in 2021 it would become public that the A's were looking to leave Oakland, seemingly proving that such a small market team like the A's couldn't compete even with Moneyball.

* EsotericHappyEnding: The film ends with Billy turning down the Red Sox's 12.5-million dollar contract to stay with the A's and his daughter, content to know that he's changed the game for the better. However, as any baseball fan would tell you, in real life things for Beane and the A's would go downhill right after. All of the large market teams would proceed to copy Beane's sabermetrics strategy, leaving the A's back where they started and struggling to compete with the richer teams. After years of missing the postseason, Beane would be KickedUpstairs by the A's ownership.

* AmericansHateTingle: Unsurprisingly, the only markets where the film performed well other than the US was Japan and Korea. Anywhere else in the world, ''Moneyball'' was a complete bomb, as it covers baseball, a sport that virtually doesn't exist outside those three countries (plus Canada and a few smaller Latin American countries). In fact, Japanese and Korean revenue made ''over half of total international revenue''. Said all that, it's still [[OverlyNarrowSuperlative the best performing baseball movie]] when it comes to non-US markets, carried there almost entirely by the names in the cast.