[Syd Thrift]

Nah, the issue here is that the map is not the field, and that was even more true in the days before pitchFX than it is now. Pitch framing always existed, we just weren't able to detect it, and the people who relied on their own intuition that was based on thousands of hours of watching and playing the game turned out not to be wrong. I'm not saying that the stat folks were wrong to stick to their guns, either; however, one thing that Baseball Prospectus for example has done a bunch of in the past 10-15 years is dial back the "us vs the world" mentality and start assuming that people who see the game differently from them arent idiots. In turn, of course, baseball has largely embraced the statistical revolution.

Just to be clear, this isn't about tone either. One of the big issues with conducting an experiment in the social sciences is that it is very, very hard to control for confounding variables. Often you don't even know what might have been confounding before it sneaks up on you. Baseball viewed from this perspective has much the same issue and we need to be a whole hell of a lot less arrogant about what statistics and the like represent.