T20i batsmen charts updated 2017-2020

A while ago I put together some charts of batsmen's scoring rates and how they scored their runs in various formats.

I thought that it would be time to look at those again.

The two rates that I mention are as follows: scoring rate is the proportion of balls scored off and boundary rate is the proportion of balls hit for a 4 or 6.

In previous graphs I used activity rate (which gave a bonus for players who ran twos and threes more often). I decided against that this time, as most other analysts tend to use scoring rate, and I'm seeing some value in consistency.

I've also coloured by the balls per dismissal.

I've started with the overall results.

The issue with this is that there's different times in the innings call for different levels of risk.

So I've also broken it down based on the time. I had to put very low limits on the balls faced at the death to have enough batsmen to actually put together a chart, so there's considerable room for sampling error in the proportions with some of the samples as low as 78 balls.

Have number 11's gotten better?

I recently read an article about the impact of DRS and technology on umpiring by Jarrod Kimber. like most of Kimber's articles, it's both informative and readable.

He asked the question in there if number 11's were getting out more or less now to lbws. Umpires seem to be more generous to the bowlers now than they used to be, but they also seem less likely to give horrendous decisions against tail enders now, where it used to seem that if a number 11 got hit on the pad, then it only had to be close for the umpire to give it.

There's also a thought that number 11s are more likely to stay in line now than they used to be.

I decided to have a quick look into it, and found that they were really getting about the same number of lbws now as they were in the pre-DRS days.

I used dismissals per hour, because it tells us more about how likely they were to be given out, as opposed to just looking at proportion of dismissals.

Flat track bullies?

One of the reactions that I got a couple of times to my last article was incredulity about how high up David Warner was. I was assured by a number of people that he was just a flat track bully, and shouldn't be rated as an opener.

I found that suggestion quite strange, because the innings I best remember of Warner's were ones where everyone else had failed, but he had stood up. So I decided to look into it.

I broke his innings into five separate groups, based on the average of every other top 7 batsman in those matches. To set my boundaries, I looked at all test matches since 1970, and found that in roughly 20% of them the top 7 batsmen had averaged below 27, the next quintile borders were roughly 33, 40 and 45.

Looking at the matches where everyone else averaged under 27 gives a good indication of how he went in difficult pitches. In those matches on the most difficult pitches, he averaged 39.45. That seemed to be really good, but it was hard to know without adding in context. What was normal?

I decided to graph the top 50 run scorers, based on those rough quintiles and see how Warner's numbers stacked up. The result is quite messy, but I highlighted a few players to provide some context.

Warner starts just below average for the top players in Quintile 1, and ends just above average for top players in Quintile 5 but generally shows a similar pattern to lots of other top players.

The line that's very high for quintile 4 was one that was of interest to me, and it turned out to be Steven Smith. He's someone who really does cash in once he gets an opportunity, so I thought it would be good to see the big 4 together here.

To get the data for Williamson, I needed to look at batsmen who had scored less than 7000 runs, and once you do that, one player generally shades all others: Don Bradman. Len Hutton also enters the fray, so I decided to extend the axis to show the Don.

The next thing that I though would be interesting was to look at the batsmen who had the biggest  difference between innings on the easier pitches and the harder ones.

Finally, it's possible to get a list of players who were in the top 30% at one end of the graph, and in the bottom 30% at the other.

Four players end up as flat-track bullies in terms of this analysis. Younis Khan, Michael Clarke, Virender Sehwag and David Warner. So it appears that there was certainly merit to those accusations.

At the other end of the spectrum were players who performed better when everyone else didn't: Inzamam-ul-Haq, Ross Taylor, Mathew Hayden and AB de Villiers.

The appearance of two team mates here was interesting. Inzamam and Younis scored 1652 runs batting together, but both had others that they scored more with, and for both of them, their partnerships together were at a worse average than with anyone else that they combined for over 1000 runs with.

The criticism of Warner as being a flat-track bully might have some basis in reality, but the difference between him and most others is really quite small. Anyone who can average just under 40 even when everyone else in the match averages under 27 is someone who is a quality player.