Baseball analysis is no different; in many ways, the community contains conflicts similar to pre-academization disputes in engineering about the need for mathematical formality and (more critically) the value of theoretical analysis coming from practitioner effort.

(It is hard to get a citation for the baseball form of this since many people involved in these conflicts are not only still alive, but they also, for example, occupy highly influential positions at Major League Baseball! Engineering-wise, see, e.g.: sites.nationalacademies.org/cs/groups/db...)