In fantasy baseball, team owners must roster players who will provide value across the board in different categories such as batting average, home runs, RBIs, runs, and stolen bases.

Not all categories are created equally. When it comes time to choosing players via draft, auction, trade, or free agency, team owners place more emphasis on some categories over others. In our experience, owners tend to treat home runs as the King of all Cats, reasonably assuming that home runs are a commodity most worthy of big investment due to perceived scarcity and the fact that a home run also translates as a RBI, run, and a hit.

But is this analysis correct? Is it wise to spend heavily on sluggers and is this strategy the best one to win batting categories in a fantasy baseball league? Based on the analysis below, we believe the answer is sort of.

We examined the top 150 batters in the 2008 season to determine the correlation between a batter’s success in an individual category and that batter’s overall value. The table below measures the degree of correlation on a scale of -1 to 1. The higher the number, the stronger relationship between a batter’s single category success and overall category success. 

From the looks of the table above, it appears as though the category of runs expresses the strongest relationship with a player’s overall value. Academic research also bears this out: We forgive those who don’t subscribe to the riveting publication, “Quality Progress.” Early last year, several professors of statistics at Babson College in Massachusetts published a paper titled “Building a Better Fantasy Baseball Team,” concluding that the one category fantasy owners should be examining above all else is runs. The most balanced and successful fantasy teams are composed of run scorers.

We can certainly anticipate response to this news. After all, aren’t runs the product of batting average, slugging ability, and speed? Furthermore, aren’t runs a volatile outcome of various factors beyond a ballplayer’s talent, including a manager’s discretion on the batting lineup and the hitting strength of that lineup? 

In a future post, we’ll have to revisit year-to-year statistical consistency in all of the major categories to see whether fantasy owners can count on a player’s run total carrying over to a following season. In the meantime, let’s assume that runs are an “outcome” of other batting skills. Does this mean that fantasy owners should see home runs as the best way to gather high run-scorers on their team?

Let’s look at another table, this time showing the correlation between runs and the three other non-outcome categories:

The table above shows a relative weak correlation between runs and each, individual category. It seems impossible to see home runs, stolen bases, or average — treated individually — as an outlet to runs. Interestingly, however, home runs shows the weakest correlation with runs of the three major categories.

Let’s try it again, this time by pairing up the three-”skills” categories and correlating them with overall fantasy value.

Alas, we’ve identified a pretty strong combination for success. Home runs independently don’t do much, but players who combine power with another skill — particularly an ability to hit the ball for average — tend to be fantasy studs and a recipe for winning the batting categories.

Based on all of this, we conclude that fantasy owners shouldn’t count home runs as the primary metric by which to identify great value for potential success. Owners need to identify another skill other than power that a ballplayer brings to the table. Otherwise, they’d be better off just running to the table of league leaders in the runs category, and taking whomever is available at the top.

Previously: “How To Win Your Pitching Categories”