How about this to end the argument.
I love baseball. I watch it, I follow it in all formats, but why is it necessary for some fans to s*** on a part of the game that enhances the enjoyment of the sport for other fans? I pay money I shouldn't pay in order to watch the Red Sox online because I live in another country. Watch all the games, would go to a bunch of them if I lived over there, but I don't.
However, I like stats, I like crunching numbers and enjoy what I consider to be a more objective measurement of the sport I enjoy. If you don't like it, that's fine, but why the interest in discrediting it if you won't take five minutes to understand what stat A or B is trying to measure or how? It's annoying as f*** and very pedantic.
I probably know more about scouting kids at 32 than most of you know in your 50's and 60's, since I live in an area where baseball is everything, and have helped (and sometimes still do) guys who prepare ballplayers for a living prepare reports and paperwork for kids and young adults, and I do it for fun. I can tell a slider from a curve and a splitter just by release and spin. None of you know as much as you think you do. A bunch of guys who scout for a living here compile stats on ipads, and are installing BIS data collection units in team's facilities for summer league. But you know more than the people who do this for a living, and if they compile stats or follow stats they're idiots. Great.
Part of the reason I barely come here anymore is that I don't understand why it's so goddamn hard to live and let die. Stats are more objective than the human eye, because the human is almost always biased towards or against things. This is a demonstrable fact. If you don't like statistics that's fine, don't use them, but don't discount them because you think you're so smart due to what you watch on tv. At least take ten minutes to try and understand what they're trying to tell you before spouting a bunch of nonsense that contradicts what the data is trying to tell you.
For the common folk like us, they're just another tool to further enhance our enjoyment of the game. Not an enemy trying to spoil our fun. Like the Yankees and their fans. That's who you should point your anger at.
/endrant.