If one wanted to build a list of great IPL batting stars, one would want players who played in a way which improved their team’s totals. In all such conversations, the audience consists of many who see no distinction between the variety of situations which arise in a Test match, which lasts 5 days and in which there are no over quotas and in which pitches wear (and are often prepared to help seam or spin) and balls get old, and the variety of situations which arise in a 40 over match, in which none of those things occur.
Players make choice every ball they face. They choose what chances to take, when to push a single, and when to challenge the fielder to hit a six. All these choices have consequences. Some players choices put downward pressure on their team’s score by using up balls, which are a scarce resource in T20 - only 120 are available to each team in one match. Other players choices put upward pressure on their team’s score by taking chances often and also getting out more frequently than the previous category of player.
How does one measure this? One way to do it is by estimated the expected runs from a given delivery. In the current case, the expected runs (note, these are not the required runs in a chase), are calculated based on three factors:
1. The number of balls remaining
2. The number of wickets in hand
3. The scoring rate in the innings at the start of the delivery
With expected runs measured in this way, for example, The 1755 balls Virender Sehwag faced in his IPL career would bring 2401.7 runs to the average T20 player. Sehwag made 2728. His average innings in the IPL was 26.2(16.9) balls. In other words, he managed 3.1 runs above expectation on average per match.
Very few players who played at least 50 matches (a cutoff which currently excludes Nicholas Pooran who has batted 47 times in the IPL, and who, in three matches time, will slot in neatly between Rahul Tripathi and Chris Gayle in the table below) have a positive runs above expected runs per match (runs_above_exp_per_m in the table).
Some are obviously tailenders who rarely get a hit, like Harbhajan Singh or Sunil Narine (who opened the batting for a while, and batted in brilliantly cavalier fashion) or Praveen Kumar or R Ashwin. Others are not. Some are top order players, like Sehwag or Shaw (the expected scoring rate from the deliveries they face - exp_sr tends to be in the 130s), while others are middle order players like Andre Russell or Keiron Pollard (exp_sr tends to be ~150).
The bottom of the list is populated by a number of brilliant batsmen from the past, present and future. Virat Kohli, Kumar Sangakkara, Steven Smith and Shubman Gill will all feature in an encyclopedia of Test cricket written in 2050 as all time greats of the format. Ravindra Jadeja will be in the same sentence as Botham and Imran in that same encyclopedia.
In the IPL however (and in T20 in general), these players are misfits. They’re too good at batting and they use up too many balls for too few runs.
Curious about how the ‘expected runs’ are calculated based on the three factors. Is it taking the average of all the balls played in IPL with a combination of those factors? And then applying it to the balls faced by the player in IPL.
Also. Where’s MSD on this list?