Sorkin Penning Pitt's Moneyball

Columbia Pictures is bringing in some big-time relief

Aaron Sorkin is ready to play ball.

With Steven Soderbergh dropping out of its Brad Pitt vehicle Moneyball, due to the usual "creative differences," Columbia Pictures is aiming to get the baseball film back on base by hiring West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin to give it a nice polish so it can move into production.

But exactly who will be taking the reins on the project is another matter.

The studio's president, Amy Pascal, put the brakes on Moneyball last month because she wasn't keen on the Ocean's Thirteen helmer's less-than-commercial vision for Steven Zaillian's latest draft, which the studio loved but which he wanted to turn into a docudrama featuring interviews with real-life ballplayers interspersed as vignettes throughout the story.

Consequently Variety reports that Soderbergh opted to leave Moneyball days before he was due to start lensing. Pitt, however, still remains committed to playing the lead in the adaptation of Michael Lewis' nonfiction best-seller Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.

Looking for some relief down the home stretch, Pascal and company turned to Sorkin, the Emmy-winning writer-producer behind TV's West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,who earned accolades earlier in his career for penning such films as A Few Good Men, The American President and more recently Charlie Wilson's War.

Sorkin just finished writing The Social Network, a drama chronicling the founding of Facebook, for Benjamin Button filmmaker David Fincher.

If all goes well, the scribe is expected to turn in his version in August, at which point the studio hopes to have chosen a new director to commence production.