One of the defining features of the early 2000s that went hand in hand with the increasing spread of the internet was a clear dichotomy between old-fashioned "dumb" and new-fangled, stats-inflected "smart" sports opinions. This manifested itself most clearly in baseball, where an emerging vanguard of stats-focused fans and analysts got a stronger foothold into the mainstream with game-changing revelations like “it is bad to make outs for no reason.” It helped that the opponents were a true rogue’s gallery of oafs and dunderheads: baseball lifers marinated in a cocoon of tobacco juice, mummified local announcers telling decades-old Mickey Mantle anecdotes, and newspaper columnists (there were still locally well-known newspaper columnists) who were photographed grimacing over typewriters and churning out sentence-paragraphs about how there’s only one stat that matters and it’s Heart.
Winning the Argument
