I recently checked around the internet to find mathematical evaluations of team Batting Average and On-base percentage plus slugging percentage in determining team run totals, to no avail, so I figured I would do it myself. Because of time constraints I only pooled two seasons of data, 2004 and 2008, but that is more than the minimum 30 required to do the test. I started by finding the linear regression of both BA and OPS as dependents against runs:

'04 BA vs Runs:

Regression Line= -417+4422X                                R=.869        R^2=.475

'08 BA vs Runs:

Regression Line= -1049+6873.786X                     R=.803         R^2=.646

'04 OPS  vs Runs:

Regression Line= -986+2315X                                R=.971        R^2= .943

'08 OPS vs Runs:

Regression Line= -730+19971X                              R=.948        R^2=.898

Totals: BA R=.746  BA R^2=.561; OPS R=.96  OPS R^2=.921

* Because I did this on my calculator and not on Excel I don't have the graphs available to show, sorry.

From here, we can easily see that although BA does predict runs, it is not nearly as significant as OPS which does so at an outstanding rate.

If we were to use hypothesis testing to evaluate this claim we would find that the Test statistic for BA is 8.861 compared to 26.894 for OPS, both over the approximately 2 critical point, causing us to fail to reject both, although showing how much more confident we can be in OPS as a predictor.

In conclusion, it is my analysis that although batting average does have a correlation with runs it is not a particularly strong one, especially compared to OPS which, at least in 2004 and 2008 had a very strong correlation to runs produced.