Sony takes its "Moneyball" and goes home

So much for Bill James transitioning from baseball to the big screen. The Sox statistician was expected to figure prominently in the movie based on Michael Lewis's book "Moneyball." But word from the West Coast is that Sony didn't like director Steven Soderbergh's rewrite of the screenplay, so killed the project. According to the LA Times, studio head Amy Pascal preferred the original script, in which James "functioned as a Greek chorus...offering wry, Yoda-like explanations about the complexity of the game." Soderbergh apparently did not, and scrubbed James from the new version. Brad Pitt was set to play A's GM Billy Beane, who's widely credited with changing the way scouts assess young players. We don't know if current and former Sox players Kevin Youkilis and Scott Hatteberg, who are both in the book, were going to be portrayed in the film.