Who Won the Showdown Between Cheerleading Twitter vs. Baseball Twitter?

In case you've missed it, cheer Twitter and baseball Twitter had quite the scuffle.

It all seems to have started with a tweet from @cheergoss, a 17-year-old competitive cheerleader, last week, showing a baseball field covered by a cheerleading performance stage.

It appears this particular field was hosting a cheerleading competition. Of course the tweet led to lots of "cheerleading isn't a sport" replies and plenty of overly dramatic gifs. Twitter user @carlitoss_46, who must be very sensitive, replied, "This made me throw up." Another reply from user @ZombieFerret77 said, "This why why everyone thinks cheerleaders are stupid," and no that's not a typo from Motherboard.

The resulting feud was summed up with @haydenaudette51's comment a couple of days later:

Of course @THISISAN_ALERT took great offense and tweeted, "Honestly the claim that baseball requires more flexibility than cheerleading is by far the most idiotic, mediocre thing I've heard in my life."

But Twitter spats aren't going to settle anything especially with emotions running so high. So, we're here to apply some data to the problem. As far as I can tell, there haven't been any studies directly comparing the flexibility of baseball players to cheerleaders. But while it's not science per se, ESPN did put together a panel of experts to assess and compare the degree of difficulty of many of the major sports.

The panel consisted of an exercise physiologist, a kinesiologist, a developmental psychologist, a pro football and baseball player, a director on the US Olympic Committee, and three sports journalists. They used 10 categories for assessing difficulty, one of which was flexibility. In the ranking, baseball was given an average score of 4.75/10 on flexibility while cheerleading was scored 7.5/10.

We're considering this particular debate settled, though feel free to fight about which is better. But cheerleading is definitely a sport so just let that one go.