Jonah Hill wears a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona

In the Oakland A's front office, as Moneyball tells it, the most important person in the room is the one who looks least like a baseball man. Peter Brand is a Yale economics graduate, soft and bespectacled, hired by Billy Beane to rebuild a poor team on statistics instead of scouts' hunches. Jonah Hill plays him mostly at a desk: a dark sweater over a check shirt, a beige keyboard, files stacked at his elbow. In one of those scenes he sits with his hands clasped in front of him, and on his wrist, in plain view, is a steel chronograph with a white dial and three black subdials.

It is a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona, reference 116520. This is the steel, pre-ceramic Daytona that Rolex made from 2000 to 2016, the generation just before the ceramic-bezel 116500: a 40mm steel case, a white dial, black registers, and the in-house Caliber 4130 chronograph inside. Writing about the appearance, Hodinkee said Hill "pulls off the steel variant with its polished center links very well." It is a lot of watch, and the film does nothing to hide it.

Brand himself is a fiction. He is a composite built around Paul DePodesta, the real numbers man in Beane's office, who asked to have his name removed from the film because he felt the script no longer depicted him accurately. The Daytona may be no fiction at all. Jonah Hill is one of the most serious watch collectors in Hollywood, the owner of a green Submariner, a gold Day-Date, several gold Daytonas, and a few Patek Philippe pieces, and as Time+Tide observed, "the man wears his watches." The same magazine says he "famously wore" the steel Daytona during the making of Moneyball. Wrist Enthusiast is more careful, noting only that he has been photographed in the same reference and "seemed to wear this watch" in the film. So which is it: a prop pulled by wardrobe, or the actor's own watch that wandered onto the set? No source settles the question.