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An even better comparison struck me. How many of you have had to take foreign language classes? The first week is rough. Often you have to learn letters or letter combinations that sound different than the English you are used to. Sometimes you have to learn a completely different alphabet. Sometimes you have to learn a completely different way of looking at the world.
After the first week or two, and you've figured out the sounds of the language, you're starting to feel a little better about things. You learn some nouns, maybe some adjectives. You memorize a few endings unique to the language. You memorize the definite and indefinite article. You start to think, this is going to be easier than I thought. Then you hit the verb, and you hit a wall. But you learn some elementary grammar which you were never taught in English class. It takes some time and effort and perseverance, but eventually you can successfully write and speak sentences a little more involved than "Mary is tired," or "The grass is green." You think you're starting to get things wired. You add some adverbs, you memorize the prepositions and their common uses. You gradually expand your vocabulary. Congratulations, you pass your first semester, or first year of your new language. But if you ever went to the country where the language is spoken, you'd quickly find out you don't know nearly enough to actually function in their society. In fact, you don't know much at all. All you have is book knowledge. And guess what? Life in that country is a little more complicated than that, and the way the language is actually used in real life reflects that complexity. Your head is spinning. If you go on to a second or third year in the language, you start to realize that language is incredibly complex. This "word" means "that," except in this circumstance where it may mean "this" or "that" or "the other thing." Oh, and there is an exception to that exception if you have certain word combinations, and there is an added nuance that native speakers clearly understand when it occurs in a certain context. Or the fundamental rules you learned in school are frequently broken by native speakers, who giggle at the "book" way you talk.
Baseball itself, not just it's terminology, is a language all it's own. Students proclaim "laws" and agree among other students that they are laws, but often in the end they are just students and not native speakers, and in real life things are not so simple. What is it they say, "A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing."
There's nothing wrong with being a student. That is a good and a worthy thing. We need more true students in our society and fewer propagandists and blowhards. But the best students, the true students, develop a profound sense of what they do not know, and it gives them appropriate humility. This is not just a way for older people to suppress younger people. There are plenty of older people who know less than plenty of younger people. But humility with respect to knowledge and wisdom is a fundamental necessity in order to progress in knowledge and wisdom. Young people: Challenge away. Ask questions. Try your best to ask GOOD questions, for they yield superior results. But always maintain a proper humility towards your subject.
By the way Thirteen, this is not aimed at you in particular. It is aimed at the general tone of strident sabermetricians who revel in making pronouncements beyond their true knowledge. I think you give plenty of evidence that you are not one of these. Oh, and I don't have one tenth the baseball knowledge that many here do.