Moneyball – a smart movie by any standard – got me thinking: in a negotiation, be it for coaches or CEOs, why does one side always insist on writing their offer down on a piece of paper, before sliding it across the table for their opposite number to unfold and read? What could possibly be on there that couldn’t be said just as well out loud? It happens all the time, and no one seems to know why.

That’s a metaphor for baseball, in a way: a game that grew into a billion dollar industry almost entirely by chance. Naturally, there’s some received wisdom about who to put where, thanks in part to the many talent scouts that sprung up around the game – tobacco types who make like they know how to pick ‘em, when it’s really just guess work. They used to sign these young kids right out of college on the promise of a shot at the big leagues. You never heard about the ones who didn’t make it, because there was always a dozen more waiting in line. We’re a century in, and not one of them can tell you why any of it does or doesn’t work.

In 2001, the Oakland Athletics lost a playoff game to the New York Yankees. They fought hard, but there remained a perception that teams like Oakland were little more than training academies for the bigger sides, who’d swoop in post-season to cherry pick the best players for themselves. Manager Billy Beane had been watching it happen for years. He assembled his scouts and asked what could be done. Just like they always had, they began pitching talent from their bound summer reports. It was a familiar roll call: good, established names with good reasons why they ought to work. Beane has heard it before and didn’t care to hear it again. “You’re not even looking at the problem. We’ve got to think differently. If we try to play like the Yankees in here, we will lose to the Yankees out there.”

He found few friends at that table, but Peter Brand understood. He had an economics degree from Yale and had never pitched a ball in his life, but that was okay: he knew about statistics and what they meant for the game. The way he saw it, scouting was fundamentally flawed. Those guys saw players as a strange bundle of reputation and hearsay, tied together by what they liked to call intuition: the unquantifiable feel they had for a player. Brand cared about just one thing: on-base percentage. It wasn’t the stuff Barry Bonds made a career out of, but it came cheap and paid well. When you throw out everything you’ve been told about age, stature or experience, you wind up with a list of guys undervalued by every metric that counts.

Moneyball isn’t just one eureka moment, it’s five eureka moments strung together into a winning baseball team. Brad Pitt might not haul logs up any snow-covered mountains, but he pushes back against an entrenched wisdom that says his revolution can’t succeed. Everyone thinks they know best. Billy Beane has a backroom staffed in the ways that don’t work anymore, and their jobs depend on them not seeing it. Watch this 25-year-old tell a room full of greybeards they’ve wasted the last 30 years of their careers on the baseball equivalent of joo joo. Look at their faces.

What’s refreshing about Moneyball is the lack of hubris. No one is less enamoured with glory than Beane, who twice laments “if we don’t win the last game of the Series, they’ll dismiss us. And everything we’ve done here, none of it’ll matter”. The mark of a great sports movie is whether a newcomer can still make sense of it, and Moneyball effortlessly distills its complex equations into dramatic scenes. The Social Network had that same quality. It is no coincidence that Aaron Sorkin worked on both, and while his work here is limited to a rewrite, his sense of occasion remains. Moneyball is no less than a complete reappraisal of how sports movies are made. It does for the genre what its subject did for baseball, and soon everyone will be picking it apart to figure out how it works.