There's a few obvious elements that make The Social Network and Moneyball seem similar. They're adaptations of controversial nonfiction books, each with an Aaron Sorkin writing credit and a traditionally comic actor cast in a serious lead role. The chief difference, I think, is that The Social Network wasn't just of interest to software developers - but Moneyball, I think, is almost certainly of interest only to people who care about baseball.
Disagree -- I wouldn't describe myself as a baseball fan per se (it's probably my favorite sport, but I'm not much of a sports fan), but the movie fascinated the hell out of me because of the math.
Every sport has stats, but no other sport obsesses over them the way baseball does. Moneyball lovingly embraces that, and as much as anything is about baseball as an exercise in numbercrunching and minmaxing.
There's an XKCD about sports narratives that I've always felt was somewhat dismissive and somewhat unjustified. This is fundamentally because I like baseball; I love going to baseball games, and I love baseball narratives. And if you do not love the complex narrative of a baseball season, or even the fundamental narrative of a single baseball game - this movie holds nothing for you. There are scenes which are blatant, unsubtle appeals to emotion - but they worked on me, because they were deployed through the medium of baseball, and like many Americans, baseball holds a deep-seated primal power over me.
I won't speak for Munroe, but while this movie is certainly about building a narrative, it really does show some serious love for the actual weighted random number generation. The movie is about the triumph of inquiry over conventional wisdom, and of empiricism over personal biases. As emotionally manipulative as it is, it paradoxically vilifies people who make emotional decisions instead of rational ones.
Anyhow, it's a fascinating story, and I missed it when it was happening. (Watched a bit of Diamondbacks that year -- it was the year after they won the World Series -- but didn't pay much attention to anybody else.)
Was disappointed to find that the most interesting character, Jonah Hill's Peter Brand, is an invention (though loosely based on
Paul DePodesta). Makes me wonder what other details were changed for the film -- maybe I'll give the book a read one of these days.
