The film Moneyball, based on Michael Lewis’ bestselling book and co-written by Aaron Sorkin, opens in theaters Friday. Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, the general manager of the cash-strapped Major League Baseball team the Oakland Athletics, who, with the help of his number-crunching assistant GM, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill)—a pseudonym for Paul DePodesta—allows the A’s to compete with large market teams like the Yankees by instituting a sabermetric (i.e. quantitative) approach to scouting players. In Lewis’ tome, Beane, who became the A’s GM in 1998 and still holds the position, was right about certain baseball prospects he championed (Kevin Youkilis) and very wrong about other future stars (Prince Fielder). See Beane’s biggest scouting hits and misses. By Marlow Stern.