Brad Pitt wears a TAG Heuer Kirium

Moneyball (2011) is about a man who got very good at finding value where no one else was looking. Billy Beane ran the Oakland A's on roughly a third of what the Yankees spent, and won, by trusting numbers the scouts dismissed and signing players the rest of baseball had written off. Bennett Miller directed it, Brad Pitt plays Beane as a soft-spoken, tobacco-spitting man who is never far from a Dixie cup, and the whole film is an argument that the obvious, expensive thing is usually the wrong thing to buy.

There is a small, perfect coincidence in the watch he wears. It is a TAG Heuer Kirium, reference WL1113, a discontinued, blue-dialed sport watch from the late 1990s, the kind of thing nobody would call a statement. And the way it reached Pitt's wrist is the most Moneyball story imaginable. On the first day of shooting, the prop master meant to give him a couple of watches to choose from. At the last minute she noticed a Kirium on the wrist of a crew member, borrowed it, and added it to the pile. That is the one Pitt picked, over the watches she had brought. A TAG Heuer specialist later tracked down a few backups, a few hundred dollars apiece, in case the original got damaged.

It would be too neat to say the filmmakers chose a modest, overlooked watch on purpose, to match a movie about overlooked value. They did not. Nobody planned it. A good watch was sitting in plain sight on a crew member's wrist, and the right person happened to notice it. Which is the entire movie.