Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Zweig recently issued “a split decision in the passive vs. active brawl” for the “Great Fund Debate” between Vanguard founder John Bogle and newsletter writer James Grant. That’s a curious verdict because Bogle has the numbers in his corner while Grant relies primarily on rhetoric and the hope that the disappointing history for active management could be different in the years ahead.

“When you buy ‘the market,’ you are buying David [Blitzer]’s market and Janet Yellen’s,” Grant reportedly said last month at a conference where he debated Bogle. “Are you quite sure you want it all?” That’s a good line in that it suggests that index investors are slaves to the whims of the Fed’s monetary policy and Blitzer’s index committee that selects stocks for the S&P 500. It’s a clever way of implying that Yellen and Blitzer are a cabal that’s managing your money. What to do? Dive head first into security selection and take charge of your destiny, or so Grant advises.

“I think there are many ways to make money or lose money,” Grant explained, “and Jack says there is but one.” The newsletter writer said the Vanguard’s founder

reminds me of a kind of Debbie Downer Little League coach who lines the kids up and says, “I don’t mean to sound discouraging, but in the big leagues it comes in at 93 mph… and beyond that, your career’s likely to be short, and most guys wash out in the minors. So I’d play softball.”

But investing isn’t baseball, as the large number of investor’s who’ve been beaned at home plate can attest. There’s a deep pool of academic and empirical research that tells us, as Charlie Ellis famously counseled, that we shouldn’t try too hard (if at all) to win at a loser’s game.

This isn’t really much a debate because the numbers overwhelmingly stack up in Bogle’s favor whereas the most that Grant can muster is a pep talk about how there’s a possibility (albeit a slim one) that you can beat the odds and outperform indexing over the long haul. But that’s a tough challenge to overcome. Indexing’s winning mix of low fees and a high reliability of achieving middling-to-above middling results within its target market, combined with active management’s drag of higher expenses and human error, tend to deliver predictable outcomes.