With how easy it is to access and how much quality information is out there among the useless information, there's no chance it's not happening. At a minimum, grunts are stealing other people's ideas without attribution. Wasn't there a blogger that named Jeremy Lin the best guard in the draft a year before Linsanity and he had some formula he used to deduce it? Lin didn't become a HOFer but still, those people are out there and if it's solid info you can bet people are stealing it. Interesting semi-related note, my brother is a baseball fan and software developer. He got an interview with the Brewers this past offseason. Didn't get the job, but the hiring manager was a former college player the Brewers drafted, but he didn't pan out. I believe he was a pitcher. In the interview my brother asked for an example or a project the team recently used. The guy responded saying he would love to share, but they don't like to talk about the things they work on - so the job would've been directly involved with personnel decisions. Gives you a bit of an idea as to how they work. On another tangent, I used to work as a reporter. In college I ran sports for the newspaper. Probably 7-10 times I was called in to meet with the AD or a coach over something I had written that they didn't like. I'm not kidding - in every single one of those meetings, they would start off with some variation of "We don't read the paper, but we caught wind of..." By the third time I would just laugh inside. Yeah, sure you don't.