The scientific method at work

So, I’m generally a big fan of the scientific method. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately because of two, quite different, influences.
First is Michael Lewis’ fascinating Moneyball. Lewis evaluated Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s as they tried to apply sabermetrics to major league baseball. For those of you who aren’t die-hard baseball fans, sabermetrics (which takes its name from SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research) attempts to find objective, statistically rigid metrics for evaluating the skill and success of baseball players and teams. For some reason, sabermetrics has largely been ignored by MLB teams. Lewis frames this interest in provocative terms: what’s the correlation between the amount of money a baseball team spends and the number of games it wins? Beane’s system revolves around using sabermetric analysis to find undervalued players that can be cheaply drafted or signed, building them into the A’s system, and then trading them when their market value increases; Lewis clearly explains how it works and the remarkable result (Oakland won more games than any other team except the Yankees last year, for a fraction of the money: around $500,000/win). Good stuff.
The other thing that’s had the scientific method on my mind is this guy, who is apparently attempting a semi-rigorous study of whether penis enlargement pills really work. I would have thought we all already knew the answer, but I guess it’s best to do things on the up-and-up. He might want to read this article about mold, lead, and E. coli contamination in “enlargement” pills, though.