I'm a stat nerd. Maybe not to the level of most, but I enjoy them quite a bit. In the schools I went to, we didn't have math teachers, we had coaches reading from a book. It wasn't until I realized that I could just substitute baseball statistics for the math problems that I began to understand and even love math, but it was baseball that got me there. I can still go to the games and enjoy them on a visceral level - I don't think about the percentages of the shift, or much beyond the superficial stuff like matchups or placement.
I remember spending a late night with a girl, probably early in college. We had hit the bong pretty hard, and we'd turned the TV on and Frankenstein was showing so we watched it. As we watched this movie which is just mythic to me, this iconic movie that I'd marveled at since being a little kid - some curtain came off and what I saw was a wooden stage with a crummy set, heard the clumping of the actors as they walked across it. I could see every little thing that had been hidden from me before, and my knowledge had ruined the childlike wonder and admiration I'd had.
Knowledge of stats has not dulled my feeling for baseball.