Baseball + graphs!

So, I wanted to do some research to find out exactly what was the most important thing in baseball, statistically. I didn’t really break it down with overall trendlines or anything. I just plotted the graphs and eyeballed it. Science! The 4 stats I used were errors, ERA, home runs and batting average. First, some scatter plots, using this seasons stats:

Baseball + graphs!Baseball + graphs!
Baseball + graphs!
Baseball + graphs!There is a definite correlation between all our stats and wins. There are a lot of outliers for the “errors” plot, which indicates that this probably isn’t as important a statistic as the others. ERA seems to have very few outliers, which would mean that there is a stronger correlation. The slope is steepest on the homers line, although there are a few outliers, and this is definitely beholden to the numbers in the statistics. There is very little difference among batting averages, except the very best and very worst, rendering this line relatively unimportant.
If I had to judge, looking at these graphs (and a few more I made but didn’t post out of laziness), the most important things when building a baseball team are:
Pitching
Power hitting
Contact hitting
Defense
There is a big gap between Power and Contact, of course. Rudimentary research, of course, but I still find it interesting.

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