No one has ever mistaken fantasy baseball for real-life baseball.  Except for me.  When I’m trouncing the nincompoops in my league, I want to feel like the victory has some greater meaning in life.  My fellow nincompoops feel much the same way, which is why we set up a Sportsline league that allows us to set the stat values to whatever we so desire.  This way, we don’t have to deal with the absurdness of a Yahoo! League where a SB is the same as a HR.

It also turns out that I’ve been tasked with learning R, an open source statistical package, for work.  Namely, I need to figure out how to do a multiple regression.  This is a statistical technique that allows you to model an outcome based on multiple inputs.  So, to learn how to use the software, I decided to model offense in baseball, and finally figure out how good our league’s scoring system really is (for offense, at least).

Here’s a warning.  It gets really nerdy from here on out, so if you’re just interested in the answer, here it is.  Our method is pretty good.  We overvalue walks.  If you’re for some reason interested in R vs. SPSS, R is an adequate replacement.

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