The Top IPL Batsmen So Far...

28 matches in.

All teams have not batted first equally often, so this is probably not where things will end up in the long runs.

The top IPL batsmen batting first (setting totals) so far are:

Prithvi Shaw, Suryakumar Yadav, AB de Villiers, Marcus Stoinis, Quinton de Kock, and Kieron Pollard. Nicholas Pooran, Dinesh Karthik and Shreyas Iyer have also had a good outing. Other than the genius de Villiers, the big international superstars - David Warner, Virat Kohli, Aaron Finch, Kane Williamson and Steven Smith - have had a modest run. Sanju Samson has had only 2 hits batting first.

ave_exppb: average expected runs per ball.
ave_rpb: average runs per ball scored

Run chases have been awful so far. The chasing team has won 7, lost 19 and tied twice in the 28 matches so far. In the table below:

ave_reqpb: average required runs per ball
ave_rpb: average runs scored per ball

Expectedly, there haven’t been too many outstanding players in the chase. The veteran professionals du Plessis and Watson have done well at the top of the CSK order, and Rahul Tewatia has had 2 great outings. But mostly, batsmen have fallen behind the asking rate and stayed behind. Other than the three obvious names, my pick for the best player in the chase would be Nicholas Pooran.

A note on the “Misbah” measure:

It is named in tribute to Joginder Sharma’s famous final over of the 2007 World T20 final to Misbah-ul-Haq. The measure for bowlers is called the ‘Jogi’. The misbah measure per innings is the difference between runs scored and expected runs for each delivery during that innings. The expected runs (when batting first) is the average runs scored in a T20 for a delivery which falls in the category defined by the n-tuple (over, balls remaining, wickets in hand). For the chasing teams, the expected runs is given simply by the required run rate which is given by (runs required)/(balls remaining).