#397 bats and stats

Another highlight of my Boston trip was attending a Red Sox game at Fenway.  While I consider myself a St. Louis Cardinals fan, I can say with certainty that Busch Stadium is severely lacking the charm and character of Fenway.  

The park in Boston is 101 years old, but has done an excellent job of preserving the look and feel of the original while at the same time modernizing the accommodations.  The scoreboard in particular is designed to look like an old-time board where numbers were manually placed instead of digitized.  One notable difference in the board is what is measured.  

I suspect that when the Fenway marquee was first put in place, it listed the lineup and possibly the bating averages of the starters.  Today, the scoreboard is a veritable statistics encyclopedia.  

For each batter, the bating average, on base percentage, slugging percentage and OPS (on base percentage plus slugging percentage) are listed.  Stats vary with each inning and are shown in a multitude of ways: percentage tonight, vs. left handed pitchers, this month, with RISP (runners in scoring position), etc.  

For each hitter, we learned the speed of each pitch, a pitch-by-pitch recalculation of the earned run average, strike percentage vs. each batter, strikeout average per nine innings, and a host of other measurements.  You can definitely tell that management subscribes to the principles described in Michael Lewis' Moneyball!

In the world of admissions, I feel a kindred spirit to the data hounds in Boston.  We tend to analyze data every which way and study detailed segments.  We have taken some of the original principles of our profession and added a modern twist to track behavior of various populations at numerous stages of the process.  I think our work has made us smarter and more able to target limited resources.

Where can you take your measurements to a new level of detail?  What can be broken down further to yield you actionable data to alter your processes or products?  Can you introduce an element of the time it takes you to do something, or analyze the behavior of a sub-set that is more targeted than what you look at now?

Think about your organization's scoreboard and what you would put on it.  If it's just runs per inning, you are behind in the count.

-- beth triplett
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