A Nugget In the Ball Tracking Record

The BCCI publishes ball-by-ball details for international matches in India with its scorecards. The IPL does the same. The scorers record whether the batter attacked or defended a delivery, and whether or not this was successful. They also record what kind of shot was played.

A summary of this record for yesterday’s fixture between the Royal Challengers Bangalore and Lucknow Super Giants is revealing.

Two measurements become available thanks to this record. The first, is the runs scored per attacking shot (runs_per_attacking_shot in the table below). This gives the effectiveness of a player’s attacking shots. The second, is the percentage of balls attacked (perc_balls_attacked in the table below).

Note that, by traditional scoring conventions, wides are not counted among the balls faced by a batter (but no-balls are). So the percentage of balls attacked can exceed 100%.

Kohli attacked 4 out of 5 balls, while du Plessis attacked 45 out of 46 balls. With the result, that even though they were both roughly equally efficient with their attacking shots (1.76 runs per attacking shot for Faf du Plessis, to 1.71 for Kohli), du Plessis ended up with 18 extra runs for 1 extra ball compared to Kohli.

It will be worth keeping an eye on these figures for the tournament as a whole. So far, they are as follows:

The top T20 hitters have runs_per_attacking_shot in excess of 2. They’re also more selective than batters like Dhawan, Kohli etc. At least, this is what it is beginning to look like. It remains to be seen if this pattern holds.