The Times has a good look at the controversy in baseball over sabermetrics.

Like any good intellectual spat, this one involves high-brow questions and low-brow insults. It also has attracted interest from fields as far from the dugout as medicine, Hollywood and Wall Street, which find themselves grappling with the same question as baseball managers: when information can be gathered more cheaply and quickly than ever before, should people rely less on their hunches and more on numbers? "I've been sat down and told they can give me a better way to do everything," Tony La Russa, manager of the St. Louis Cardinals and the hero of a new book celebrating the hunch, said last week, describing the statistics crowd. "They really are convinced that they can sit there and crunch out a formula that negates my power of observation. "It's been a little irritating, because there's a certain arrogance with that whole group."