My oldest son is a junior business and finance major in college, and completed a project in a statistics class involving run variations in major league baseball. Part of his findings was that 89% of any team's runs can be predicted strictly by OPS, and that batting averagealone did not bear a significant relationship to runs. He also used OPS and three other factors to determine a team's runs to 94%.

There was one team that habitually scores a much larger number of runs each season than their OPS would suggest: the St. Louis Cardinals. A large part of this is because they tend to do better than the rest of baseball in one crucially important, but often overlooked statistic: BA with runners in scoring position.
This is not a random stat determined by luck. Rather the Cardinals have a pattern, my son found, of frequently getting a batter to first base when that base is open with other runners on second and/or third. There is a statistically better chance of a batter driving in a run with a runner in scoring position when first base is occupied.

The paper also found that base stealing for most teams produces a negligible effect on overall runs as the average SB percentage around the league makes the stat a wash.

Anyway, my son was an intern last year for the Pittsburgh Penguin farm team and he discussed his project several times with people in the office. He got a call from a friend that a member of the Pirates front office (a friend of the guys with the Penguins) was in town and asked to talk to my son and look over his paper, which he did. A few days later they called and offered him money...not for the report, but for his agreement only not to publish it or share it with anybody for three years.