You might be on to something there. I always felt that the average PNW person never did understand baseball because they didn't play it. We played year-around, we knew and felt the game.

You also hit a great point about statistics. Over time, I saw an emphasis on statistics to make decisions. The "better" the stat, the more weight it held, regardless of how the biology fit in. Statistics are simply and only the relationship between two numbers and nothing more.

Having said that, managers are forced to make decisions based on numbers. You can catch X, not Y and our best model shows that this is how to proceed. Management, at its best, is science informed art but the intrusion of legal requirements eliminates the art. Hence, the model shows that a recreational cutthroat fishery in the Stilly kills Chinook. Since we can't do that, no fishing. And no intrusion of reality.