Batting average is baseball right? Right. And maybe you’re as surprised as I am to know that Six Sigma can figure in a baseball game. Yes, it can. Thomas Pyzdek, a leading consultant in Six Sigma and an Arizona Diamondbacks fan, shows how.
He related a story about an employee who played in his company’s baseball team. The team had not been performing well as expected. And Bill, the lead character in the story, felt he was partly responsible for it. He stunk at the plate. He strongly felt he had to do something about it and quick. Good thing, Bill is a Six Sigma Black Belt. He could solve his batting problem just like he would solve any process problem at work—by conducting a designed experiment.
Bill determined which factors are important. He wrote down a lengthy list of possible factors and narrowed his list down to four experimental variables for hitting: foot position, choke on bat, position in box, and speed of pitch. He then examined each variable. For foot position, he considered its square angle at 45 degrees. For the choke on bat, he set it at 2 inches. For position in box, he could go forward and backward. For the speed of pitch, he could go as fast as 60 to 80 miles per hour. (See Tables for details.)
To improve on these, Bill spent a few evenings and weekends to practice his pitches. The experiment finished after two weeks. The results showed that the interaction of the four variables definitely had an impact on Bill’s overall pitching performance, but the foot positioning and his position in the box did not have a significant effect on his batting average.
The analysis is that when Bill is facing a pitcher with real heat (say 80mph), he can improve his batting average from 8 percent to 28.75 percent by standing near the back of the batter’s box. Conversely, when Bill is up against a 60-mph hurler, he’s better off in the front of the batter’s box (38.75 percent in front hits vs. 15 percent in back).
Combining all of these results, Bill’s strategy is to always choke up on the bat and position himself in the batter’s box depending on the expected speed of the pitch.
This is definitely an interesting way to improve one’s game. Can you do the same for your chosen sport?
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Batter up!
