Sports: Big bats, little bats

Dear Stat-hound Tin Canners:

Baseball is probably the sport most steeped in stats.

I thought I'd go play with some stats and see what comes up.

Is there a web page that measures how dependent a team is on the home run to win games?

Two of this blog's beloved teams occupy the bottom of the stats in terms of hitting home runs.

I suppose the best measure would be to find out how many RBI result from home runs and then divide that by total runs. The more dependent a team is on HRs the higher the percentage.

But since Yahoo! Sports MLB Stat page doesn't have that option, what can I use?

I suppose I could take total runs divided by home runs?

Thus, the higher the number the less dependent that team is on the home run.

How does that play out?

The White Sox have hit the most home runs with 174 and not surprisingly they have scored the most runs with 658 runs. Therefore, their R/HR ratio is 3.78.

The Royals who have hit the least home runs have an R/HR ratio of 6.28. Interestingly, they are not at the bottom of the list in terms of runs scored in the season.

My Dodgers have hit the second least amount of home runs and their R/HR ratio is 5.85. In terms of total runs, they are in the lower part of the upper half of all teams.

The team with the second most home runs is the Reds. Their R/HR ratio is 3.45! Oddly enough, they have scored only a few more runs than the Dodgers.

Thus, can we say that the Royals and Dodgers play little ball while the White Sox and Reds play long ball?

Rene