Edgy MD wrote: I think the accidental fallacy of Moneyball was convincing people that such understandings as the break-even point in stealing, the existence of clutch hitting, the value of defense were closed matters — something I don't think Michael Lewis or Billy Beane or Bill James would have endorsed. I think we opened up new and important questions, but some things we stopped refining, and so an old set of prejudices was largely displaced by a new set. And Bill James himself has publicly said so. He and his followers upset the status quo by questioning what had always been seen as "true". In a piece (ten years ago?) titled 'The Fog of Numbers' (IIRC), James cautioned the current wave of stats hounds not to assume that their generation has any more of a monopoly on truth than the old one did and that the new status quo deserves just as much questioning as did the old. Maybe, he opined, clutch hitting as a skill really does exist but it's merely that the evidence hasn't been found yet. To take a similar argument on a different subject, ethanol was once considered the holy grail of environmentalists while nuclear power was the ultimate evil. Since then, Al Gore admitted that the ethanol push was both a failure and a total waste of (your and my) money, while some former Greenpeace leaders have since made a 180 and now embrace nuclear as at least a piece in the fight against global warming. These flip-flops (if you want to even call them that) don't mean that you don't agree on the problem only that no one view necessarily has a monopoly on the answers. In this context it often bothers me when I hear the term "settled science" being thrown around because it tends to imply that everything there is to know on the subject is already known.