The point I was trying to make wasn't about hiring "for experience" but leveraging those who were around them to vouch for their aptitude. This is a distinct difference, and you have to work hard to get people to think in these terms instead of amount of experience. I may be naive in even thinking we're accomplishing this.

Without the public displays of performance that baseball has, there's another level of indirection that you must filter through to try and illustrate a candidates performance.

This makes it something like the "Moneyball of Moneyball of programming".