What **Walter ** said. 
RickJay, speaking of strawman arguments (such as yours), no, obviously you don’t have a problem if you can be a fan as well as a stathead. That isn’t the OP’s complaint, though.
If you’d rather sit next to, and talk with, another middle-aged, beer-gutted, girlfriendless stat freak than a decent-looking woman who’s enjoying the game on whatever basis she likes, then that *is * a problem. Yours.
No, the OP (me) specifically identified himself as a fan in his OSentence. That you refuse to see that that my interest in stats is on top of, not instead of, my enjoyment watching baseball games, is a problem. For your argument, if not for you personally.
And if you’d rather sit next to someone at a baseball game whose brain and loud mouth are full of stale popcorn because you think she has nice-looking titties, rather than the articulate gentlemen from whom you could learn a good deal, then that’s your problem, too. But maybe the real problem here is couching arguments in such irrational ways altogether, no?
Though offered in jest, PRR’s last post is why I don’t find “statheads” to be good baseball buddies: they consider their role to teach me the game, explaining their numerological system to me while the game is being played, second-guessing the manager, and checking their cellphone web interface for other stats so they can see how their fantasy team is doing.
Another base canard. I detest fantasy baseball, and most statheads share my revulsion for an artifice that serves only to keep their adherents following the games, which we on the contrary find inherently fascinating without all the nonsense of fantasy teams’s false reliance on stats as an end in themselves.
Death to fantasy baseball!! Vive the game!!!
That’s why I take my wife to the game and not Bill James. Honestly, do you always just invent stuff and pretend the other person said it? Oh, yeah, you do.
Again, you’re simply making shit up. Pure straw men. The OP said nothing like “I don’t like sitting next to anyone but statheads at a ball game.” He said it would be nice not to sit next to people who criticize him as a fan, and who wouldn’t agree? If you’d read the very first paragraph:
[quote]
Baseball fans, of whom I’m one, sometimes like to state that they enjoy the game but don’t enjoy the statistical outlook on the game. I’m fine with that–**you can enjoy anything you like, including sniffing the peanut shells beneath the seats, and I have no problem with you whatsoever. Live and let live![/**QUOTE]
… you’d know what the guy was trying to say.
So just why do you hate nice-looking titties?
I don’t know. Maybe they remind me of America.