While we're on the subject of fave experiments...

Circulatory theory.  Before William Harvey in the 1600's, scientist believed that animal bodies had two blood/fluids, a blue and a red.  (Well, what would you have thought?  Animal bodies do indeed have many, many kinds of fluids in them.)

Harvey cut open a snake and -- nobody ever thought of this before -- applied a forceps to the vein entering the heart.  The heart collapsed.  He applied a forceps to the artery on the other side.  The heart ballooned.

Harvey reasoned that the heart was a sort of motor, pushing fluid around and around in a circle.  

This is the kind of fundamental, game-changing insight that throws down a foundation for lesser scientists.  It's great to build a better bridge.  It's another thing to be the first one to conceptualize a bridge.

.....

In James' 1982 abstract, he had devised a way (Value Approximation Method, VAM) to measure the output of the 28 minor league systems (the "motor" heart that pushes talent upstream).

One of his co-writers grouped the MLB organizations into thirds:  top, middle, and bottom.  (See page 17 of the 3rd issue). They found that the successful organizations had something in common:

... and, in 1982, they proved* that (inexpensive) scouts were producing many, many times their cost in output.

It's particularly interesting to me that the best teams employed a lot of part-time scouts.  It seems to me that 30 part-time scouts would be much, much more effective than 10 full-time ones.

The Mariners could probably secure G-Moneyball's best scouting efforts for a couple of thousand dollars a year -- or even for the cost of some game tickets, even a minor-league pass.  The Mariners could probably get Taro's intel on NPB players for the cost of NPB game tickets.  

I don't know why ML teams don't have >100 G-Moneyball, Taro, JFro type locals submitting their "Best Bets".  I hope it isn't simply that they don't want to feed the ducks and pollute the water....

.....

Yu Darvish apparently is headed stateside in 2012.  Is there anybody whose recommendation you'd rather see, than Taro's?  Do you think that Jim Callis' Baseball America report, here, is more likely to be accurate than one provided by Taro?  I sure don't.  

The Mariners' circulatory system is certainly miiiillllllles better than it was four years ago.  But suppose some MLB team decided to recruit a vast network of Sandy-Raleighs to work for them for $1,000 per year?

What if such a team scored 3x, or 4x, or 10x the talent, in the bottom half of the draft, even than good teams do now?