Back in October, news broke that Michael Lewis’ brilliant Moneyball — one of the most influential, not to mention brilliant sports books of this generation (ever?) — was set to become a movie. Brad Pitt would be playing the role of A’s GM Billy Beane. Handsome man in real life begets handsome man on the big screen.

I was a bit dubious when I first heard about this, namely because when I think of baseball movies that involve actual MLB teams I think of Rookie of the Year and Little Big League. These movies were outstanding when I was a kid; they are remarkably horrible now.

But there are some stellar characters in the book — Beane himself, Paul DePodesta, Scott Hatteberg — and it really is all quite a fascinating topic.  As long as Columbia doesn’t royally screw this one up, it should be pretty enjoyable. If nothing else, everyone with a subscription to Baseball Prospectus will at least go see it.

But the Moneyball lineage is apparently not stopping there. According to Chadwick Matlin of The Big Money, Lewis is set to write a sequal to Moneyball, but it’s been pushed back by a book he’s writing about the current financial crisis that’s set to drop this fall. (Another new Lewis book, Home Game, drops this summer.) Looks like we have something else affected by the financial crisis: another baseball book by Lewis.

The prospects here are tantalizing. Is this book solely going to focus on Beane post Moneyball: Part 1? One guy I can think of that might be profiled heavily is Frank Thomas — who Joe Posnanski wrote about glowingly yesterday — because he had an MVP-like season for the A’s in 2006, when the White Sox had left him for dead. That was capitalization on market deficiencies, if I’ve ever seen it.

More logically, though, it seems that Lewis should branch out here, and see how the sabermetric era is affecting the league as a whole. First stop would be Boston, because I’ve heard they’ve been pretty successful since Theo Epstein and crew took over Fenway.

Anyways, Mr. Lewis, will you hurry up already? It’s not like anything you’ve written about the stock market or finances has ever resonated. Oh, wait. Nevermind.

(Link via Mr. Shanoff.)