Stat guys actually trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t in a game they love. Sure, a knee-jerk sac bunt keeps you out of the DP, but it also trades 33% of your currency for that inning. Baseball is the most intensely statistical game of the major sports, ruled in large part by chance. Figuring out what gives you the best chance of success is harder in baseball than the other sports. Statistical analysis is as old as the game itself; blow it out your ass, Flanagan.

In answer to the “why is advanced statistical analysis rejected question. I think it goes like this:
- the majority of those doing the analysis were or are athletes. Because, you can’t know anything about sports unless you’ve played them at an elite level, duh.
- most advanced stats try to provide insight beyond what we can easily see on the surface, often resulting in determining that a player is not as good as people think or not as bad as people think. It challenges the bedrock of everything they were taught in playing (see: “productive outs”, “grittiness”, etc.).
- some of these stats dare to try to be predictive. Things like Pecota REALLY piss them off because they often predict their declines and no athlete wants to be told he’s about to be finished.

Notice nowhere in that did I say that athletes are stupid so they don’t like math, which would be the equivalent of the “mom’s basement” argument.

FWIW- when I first read that Flanagan was going to do the nickname thing, I thought the “mom’s basement” nickname was actually an homage to the FGM folks. But that was before the cheesy definitions.