So I've kept thinking about Sterling and Waldman's inane rants about the Yankees inability to score runners from third with less than two outs, and I think I've figured out a way to measure the percentage of baserunners scored against the anticipated average.

Disclaimer: there are statistics here and some math, but nothing more complicated than algebra.  I never took pre-calc or calculus, and I got Cs and Bs (mostly Cs) in high school.  In college I took Music Theory instead of a math course.  Long story short- if I can do this math, so can you.  (I've cross posted this over at Beyond the Box Score  to see if I can get any of their brains to double check my work).

Everybody strapped in?

[(OBP+SLG)] * x = anticipated % of baserunners scored

I made the chart in Excel, and I've loaded a screenshot to Photobucket, but there's no way to get it onscreen clearly, so you'll have to go here to see it.

I started off charting % of baserunners scored against team slugging percentage, and I found a nearly direct relationship.  This makes perfect sense, right?  It takes 3 singles to score a run, 2 doubles, or one homer- so the higher the SLG, the higher the % of runners driven in.

So then the question that matters is: how good is the team at getting on base? 

By taking the average of %Scored for the last three seasons I solved for x, which is .503 in this sample.

We'd expect the Yankees to score 36.8% of their baserunners this season, compared to the 36.1% they've actually scored.  So I'd say they're performing exactly as we should expect.

Sterling and Waldman are right in comparison to the last couple of season, when the Yanks scored 41% and 42.2%.  Offense has been down across the entire league so far this season, and for the Yankees it's been an especially precipitous drop: .463 down to .423 on top of a OBP drop of .366 to .337.

The Yanks shouldn't expect to score much more until they improve their entire offense (duh, right?).