FanHouse Brad Pitt

Moneyball, Michael Lewis' novel about the economics of baseball (to put it in a nutshell), was all set to begin production next week with Brad Pitt and Steven Soderbergh in tow. Read: the nerds have finally won, Lebowski!

Unfortunately that would-be -- and actually fictional -- revolution has now been delayed for the foreseeable future as Columbia Pictures, for all intents and purposes, pulled the plug on the movie.

Michael Lewis' book about Billy Beane's strategy in making a small-market team successful in Major League Baseball, "Moneyball," is going to be made into a feature-length movie. Shooting isn't set to begin until June, but many of the key players are being put in place. Brad Pitt is going to play Oakland A's general manager Beane (the two are pictured side-by-side here) and Steven Soderbergh will be the director.

Now, according to variety.com, Demetri Martin has been added to the fray, and he'll play Paul DePodesta, currently employed by the Padres, but formerly the Dodgers general manager and Beane's assistant GM in Oakland.

For my money, Michael Lewis' Moneyball is one of the best sports books ever written. In fact, it's one of my all-time favorites regardless of genre. It's captured the whole "scouts vs. stats" phenomenon perfectly, flummoxing hard-core traditionalists (many of whom mistakenly still believe Billy Beane wrote the book).

But as much as I love the book, I'm a little shocked at the decision to turn it into a movie:

Steve Zaillian has signed on to adapt Michael Lewis' nonfiction bestseller "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game," and David Frankel is attached to direct. Project is being developed as a potential starring vehicle for Brad Pitt.

Book's subject is Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane, who assembled a contending baseball club on a shoestring budget by employing a sophisticated computer-based analysis to draft players.

I'm not plugged into the Hollywood scene so the name Zaillian means zilch to me, but apparently he's the brains (writer/director/producer) behind All the King's Men and wrote the screenplays for American Gangster and Gangs of New York -- all three of those movies were excellent, so he's earned the benefit of the doubt.