Even though we, as a baseball web site who is attempting to write hard news baseball information, like to avoid opinion, we're going to take exception and discuss the blog post made by Jeffrey Flanagan at the Kansas City Star in a blog-type post of our own. Before reading on, please click on the link and read Flanagan's entry.

We came across Flanagan's three paragraph piece (well, two paragraphs and one 80-word sentence if we're getting technical) via a link by our friends at The Big Lead to a post made by Fire Joe Morgan, who did a great job tearing Flanagan apart.  The gist of the Flanagan's rant is attempting to generalize what Flanagan calls "stat obsessed" baseball fans as "Mom's Basement" (The lazy basement reference of course has been made about bloggers in the past three-four years as well, coinciding with their increasingly large and vital role in the sports landscape). 

To say that most baseball fans who consume statistics are 54 and live in their mom's basement is ridiculous. It's up there in its lunacy with the historically bad categorization that the United States made after the bombing at Pearl Harbor, when they rounded up all the Japanese people (citizens too) living in America (approx. 110,000) and threw them in internment camps.   

The Mom's basement generalization would be like saying that all Mexicans steal televisions after watching an episode of Judge Judy.  It's about as idiotic as saying that that all basketball players like to masturbate in libraries.

Sure, Mr. Flanagan, maybe you know of one that does live in their mother's basement.  That doesn't mean they all do.

Day-by-day hardballreport.com attempts to scour the internet looking for interesting stat-based articles from various websites to link to and write about. And we hope that those who check back with us on a regular basis consider us a "Mom's Basement" type of web site.  Not to speak for all of the writers contributing their work on this site, but I am shocked that a journalist at such a high-quality publication like the Kansas City Star would marr the excellent work of his colleagues (Jason King, Joe Posnanski and Jason Whitlock in particular) with such epically poor journalism/writing.

Oh, and one last thing. To say that "stat-obsessed guy never played sports, or if he did, probably was embarrassingly bad at them" ignores the biggest reason why sabermetrics and a love for stats exists. 

Billy Beane.

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