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Just to be clear, I didn't make my reply with the intent to be argumentative. :)  I was just giving the readers a bit of my position on this particular issue, because I think it helps to see it from the side of someone who is, at the very least, peripherally involved in the field.
I love this game and I know that just about everyone who works in sabermetrics does so in their spare time and because they love it as much as I do.  Sometimes I think that gets lost in what we write and publish, and we are accused of losing contact with the game (which we tend to find offensive, because we know it is not true).  I think while we're reminding people that James has the right idea about linking sabermetric ideas with a real historical context and a dash of love for the game, we should remind people as well that sabermetricians aren't really any different from other fanatical baseball fans...what comes out in public tends to be what they're used to seeing in their own professional lives.
It's important to remember that science is an adversarial process because if it is NOT adversarial, you end up with the ClimateGate scandal...a bunch of "professionals" incestuously pushing a group-think-generated idea forward as consensus.  The adversarial process is supposed to prevent such things from happening.  It's ugly...I don't know if I have the right personality for it...but it works.  And that same adversarial process applies to advancing our knowledge of baseball above the group-think mentality of the sports-writers who used to control how the public thought about the game.

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