Without perspective, baseball statistics are meaningless. But with, even the most basic of statistics can provide a wealth of information on the sport.

With the help of http://www.baseballprospectus.com's wealth of statistical information, and a whole lot of Excel usage, I bring my analysis of run scored in baseball.

In this study, I observed the team totals of every season, initially just from 2004 to 2008, but eventually expanded to include the seasons from 1967 to 2008, excluding the strike shortened years of 1981 and 1994. Overall, I worked with 1,064 team seasons of data in this study.

The statistics used in this research were all the basic count statistics: Outs, Walks, Singles, Doubles, Triples, Home Runs, Hit By Pitch, Stolen Base, and Caught Stealing. These numbers were regressed on the one statistic that really matters for an offense in the end: runs.

Before actually beginning my research, I decided to split up the outs and walks category into more specialized data points. Walks were split into two: unintentional (UBB) and intentional (IBB).

Outs took some more digging, however. I eventually broke up outs into 4 categories: strikeouts (SO), sacrifice hits (SH), sacrifice flies (SF), and Non-sacrifice outs on balls in play (NSOBIP), which encompasses outs on in play balls.

Initially only interested in researching the recent history of run production, I took the last 150 team-seasons of MLB. Using the Excel function LINEST (with explanation and output found here), I was able to derive this regression.

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