Well, I had a good long run, but after almost 20 years of movie-going, it finally happened: I fell asleep during a movie.

Thirty minutes into “Moneyball,” the true story of a manager of the poorly funded Oakland Athletics trying to make the best team possible out of a limited budget, it had already been made pretty clear that the movie was not intended for me, ignorant of and uninterested in baseball’s history and allure. And if the movie didn’t care about me, I certainly wasn’t going to care either.

So, I let my eyelids drop and my head slump and caught up on some much-needed rest. It was only a nap of five or so minutes, timed during one of the many trivial and contrived conversations between Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane and his daughter, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t the most enjoyable five minutes I spent in that seat in that theater.

But I’m being mean. “Moneyball” actually isn’t a bad movie. It’s well shot, acted and directed. The dialogue is smart, and the artistic flourishes in cinematography and editing are interesting and well contained. I give “Moneyball” the credit it deserves for these formal aspects. Believe me, they did not go unnoticed.

But there is a problem, and it’s a big one. At its core, “Moneyball” is a movie about baseball when it should have been a movie about people.

And even when it’s about baseball, it isn’t — at least, not in the traditional, romantic sense of baseball: hard work, innovation, heart and grit. No, the baseball of “Moneyball” is one of statistics and cold, simple numbers on a page. The film’s primary message, that a number is all that is important, is odd and distancing. It’s even odder that this message is packaged and presented as some great, heartwarming instance of human triumph.

Now, this may be how baseball really works — this preferring of autonomy and consistency over potential and inventiveness. I don’t know, and frankly, I don’t care. All I can judge is the movie playing on the screen. And for me, I found it difficult to relate to and even more difficult to be inspired by it.

The people around me in the theater, if their laughs and cheers are to be believed, obviously felt differently, but I can’t help but to attribute this more to nostalgia and familiarity than to any machinations of the film itself.

Essentially, “Moneyball” devolves into a simple dichotomy. Those who like baseball will like or love it, and those who don’t will leave the theater dissatisfied, bored, confused or all three. It’s a shame that “Moneyball” didn’t try harder to captivate those outside its target audience, but it does at least deserve to be commended for giving its fans what they want. Far too many films these days can’t even accomplish that.

3 out of 5