[jimmybot]

There's a very important difference that you're missing. In the scam you're applying you're random machine over all possible results. In the sabermetrician example, the random machine is being applied across methodologies of picking prospects, ie bunch of different "moneyball" hobbyists trying out different stats and weights to rank players. The end result is the possibility of the discovery of a very good methodology that has found stats that traditionally are not important.

[corin_]

But it takes more than one result to tell whether the methodology is good or if it was just lucky - otherwise it's just a guy tossing a coin once and saying "see, I predicted heads!"

[jimmybot]

Agreed. And you can't even do that test with a scam, which was my point.