Ha! Your comment Jeff that:
Most of the time -- lemme say good-naturedly -- we take our visceral reaction to Fielder into the room, and then unravel 9,000 intellectual arguments for or against, to justify our visceral reactions.
reminds me of oh so many arguments I had in school. I have always found that those who pride themselves the most on being "logical" as opposed to making "emotional" opinions are in fact full of it. I argue that we all start with what is essentially an emotional response - inherently a "first impression" or your "visceral reaction." And then, through the filter of our own life experiences, we puruse through the data at hand. We latch on and identify with the data points that fit into our initial hypothesis. Why? Because they feel right.
A logical mind would argue that they think in a manner of "given X and Y therefor Z " - whereas I think it's much more human to go "I think Z, therefor lets find X and Y that agree with me."
Believing that, I have come to respect those who look at a dataset as a way to disprove their current beliefs much more than those who look to find data that reinforces those beliefs. Science pretty much operates on this principle. You put forward a hypothesis. You test it. You reject it. You put forward another one.
All to often, as evidence by your many posts today, we find in the baseball "sabermetric" world an intellectual dishonestly that is the search for reaffirmation of their ideas, rather than the realizing that their proferred idea is a hypothesis, and only by testing and rejecting an hypothesis can we get closer to the truth.
In politics, in baseball, in whatever forum really, be wary of the echo chambers.
-Ben.
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Dropping this response into this thread instead of the many other more recent ones seems somewhat inappropriate - oh well.