Dear Mr. Morgan,
I owe you an apology. No, not a snarky, sarcastic, "Haha this will get a lot of pageviews and I'll smack him down at the end—Big laughs all around!" sort of apology. A real one.
About five years ago, I started publishing my own research as a little hobby, and I found out some interesting things about baseball. It was fun, not only in a nerdy way, but in the sense that I really felt like I was contributing to a better understanding of the game.
Had it stopped there, I wouldn't be writing this letter of apology. But it didn't. Something happened to me over time. I'm not sure when it happened, but gradually the work became less about having fun by talking about the game of baseball and more about proving that I knew more than anyone else. I somehow convinced myself that the sabermetric way was the only true way to understand the game... and I laughed at those who said otherwise, including you, Mr. Morgan.
In my reflections (and uh, Gregorian number-crunching) I came to some rather interesting conclusions. I can’t get into specifics (so please don't ask) but I will say this: there are things that are generally publicly held as sabermetric doctrine—in some cases, crucial underlying assumptions—that are demonstrably false.
In other words, I discovered that I was capable of being... wrr… wrrro... wrrrrr... incorrect.