Sportsthodoxy Guide to Statheads and the Tea Party

Recently, noted bow-tie enthusiast Ken Rosenthal compared the baseball stathead community to the Tea Party, implying that they had gotten so vociferous and unyielding in their debates over the Hall of Fame that they'd shut all possibility consensus down. Whether that argument holds true or not - there's something to be said about the you-damn-kids-get-off-my-lawn vitriol heaved by the Tracy Ringolsbys of the world as contributing to the general air of frostiness, not to mention Jon Heyman's factually inaccurate mash note to Malibu Fantasy Jack Morris, but that's neither here nor there. At Sportsthodoxy, we feel it is our duty to help you differentiate between the Tea Party and sabermetricians through this useful field guide:

	The Tea Party	Baseball Statheads
Wear....	...outdated tricorn hats and wigs	...outdated t-shirts from 90s power-pop bands
Congregate...	...near hilariously misspelled protest signs	...in their parents’ basements
Prone to long-winded rants about...	...the Founding Fathers, never mind that they didn’t say half the stuff these guys say they did	...Bill James, founding father of sabermetrics, never mind that he’s working for the Red Sox
Fallback argument is...	...the Second Amendment	...WAR (because OPS+ is kludgy as hell, and WARP3 is proprietary)
Have an in-spite-of-his-meager-track-record crush on...	...Rand Paul	...Erubiel Durazo? Kila Ka’aihue? Daric Barton? Wily Mo Pena?  They're sluts, the lot of them.
Dream of...	...a smaller government	...a smaller BBWAA
Favorite flag is...	“Don’t Tread On Me”	“World Series Champions” pennant
Don’t like Jack Morris because...	...he did his best work in Detroit, which is a union town	...he wasn’t actually that great
Believe the Distributive Property is...	...a Socialist plot	...basic math
Hate government funded ballparks because...	...they’re a taxpayer financed boondoggle	...they’re a taxpayer-financed boondoggle

My God. Rosenthal is right after all.