The management of the 2002 Oakland Athletics baseball team found itself in a bind. The team had performed well the previous year, making it to the playoffs, but in the offseason, three of its best players were lured away by lucrative contracts offered by east coast powerhouses. In a relatively small market and with a limited budget, the A's had to find a way to compete. Their general manager, former big-leaguer Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt), stumbled upon a revolutionary strategy to turn the A's into winners.

Beane's breakthrough occurred through the assistance of a young, untested, Yale-trained, junior executive named Peter Brand. Setting aside the assumptions that had, for decades, determined the way baseball talent was assessed, Brand asked a pair of elemental questions: what wins games? Answer: scoring runs. And what makes scoring runs possible? Answer: getting on base. Therefore, he concluded, if you want to win games, you have to acquire players who have a knack for getting on base. He had developed a metric for determining precisely who had that ability. He also discovered that baseball executives and scouts often overlooked or undervalued those very players.

Inspired by Brand's vision, and armed with his statistics, Beane assembled his scouts for a meeting regarding the acquisition of players for the upcoming year. Over and again, the grizzled and experienced baseball men spoke of the "look" or the "body" of a player, the way the ball "jumped off the bat" of one prospect, the "confidence" of another. Exasperated, Beane shouted, "But do they get on base?!" He was implying that an impressive and athletic player might not actually be the kind of player that wins games. He wanted his scouts, who were beguiled by the romance of the game, to share his own clarity of vision in regard to their ultimate purpose.

Needless to say, the old veterans didn't jump right on board. Neither did the manager; neither did the sports writers; neither did the fans. And when Beane's team, assembled according to Brand's calculations, started the season slowly, the critics came out in force, accusing the general manager of arrogantly standing athwart years of baseball common sense. But Beane stuck to his guns, and the team "of misfit toys" began to gel, and then to excel, and finally to produce the longest winning-streak in American league history.