What it comes down to is you have bunches of sabermetrics fanatics indulging in gamesmanship to out-clever the next guy armed with a calculator in how to redesign baseball.
Since the analytical revolution took over baseball, it has attracted a lot of smart dolts who cannot always comprehend why something that works in their modeling doesn't necessarily apply to the actual event.
I don't know how Cricket is handling it, but when I was kid, it became a tribal thing: the old school guys and the sabermetric crowd battling for supremacy on how to value/describe/scout/etc the game of baseball. And of course the journalists and reporters stoked the fires because it made good copy- old vs young, feel vs statistics...it didn't matter that the reporters couldn't handle the simple arithmetic or understand what old-timey scouts were looking for....it was a battle to the death where every story was conveniently framed between these two poles.
And while I've always fallen on the stat/analytical side of the issue, there is a lot of
urban idiocy going on that never gets ridiculed because the advanced-statistics thing is novel and hip...besides, no one can be more arrogant than a man with his model.
So I do feel a little epicaricacy when these little wonders fall flat on their face.
The "old school guys" could be dumb as rocks (and let's be honest, the old way of doing things is that the owner would hire a guy he got along with as GM, and then the GM would hire staffs of people who were friends with him, and so on down the line....whether they were good at scouting/teaching/coaching/etc was a secondary concern) but they got the general gist of the game and didn't pretend like they invented fire.