If you’re interested in learning how agile, innovative thinking can triumph over deep pockets, go out and see “Moneyball” — or just stay home and watch baseball’s 2011 playoffs.

Of the four teams that are still alive — the Detroit Tigers, the Texas Rangers, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Milwaukee Brewers — only the Tigers boast one of baseball’s 10 largest payrolls, and even they barely make the cut, at No. 10.

This has made for a thrilling postseason. Fox may have groaned at the unexpected departure of the Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies (not to mention the Red Sox’ September collapse), but a lot of baseball fans didn’t. Thanks partly to the cultural phenomenon of “Moneyball,” which demonstrated that teams didn’t need a big payroll to win, we’re all small-market fans now, no longer rooting for the hapless underdog — sorry, Mets and Cubs — but for the team that is doing more with less.

It’s a subtle but significant distinction and it has unmistakable political overtones, especially during this time of rising class resentment. You didn’t have to spend the day dancing around the drum circle in Zuccotti Park to see Game 5 of the Yankees-Tigers division series in New York — with its constant cutaways to those slick-suited men hunched over their BlackBerrys in the Legends Suites — as more than just a baseball game. (It may be time to update the old cliché that rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel. Today, it’s more like rooting for Goldman Sachs.)