Eddie Cowan is right - we need better stats in cricket. But which ones?

Eddie Cowan, who is fast becoming the best cricket writer in the country, had a thought provoking piece on Cricinfo yesterday about statistics in cricket. He made the argument that our focus on averages is archaic and not terribly explanatory. It's well and truly worth a read.

I want to make at least a preliminary attempt at taking up the challenge. I've set out below a handful of statistics that I think would be extremely useful but that can be easily collected without the use of hawkeye or other elite technologies.

In putting these together I've considered the sorts of stats we already have, but also the traits that we are told make good players, or the outcomes we told that teams should aim to produce. The point of these stats is not necessary to define the 'best' players, but to offer a means of finding players with particular advantages over their peers.

I add the caveat that I think these would be most useful in test and first class cricket, but could be useful in any format.

I would welcome more suggestions in the comments!

Batting

1. Team runs per wicket at entry and exit

We hear a lot that great batsmen can 'turn a game around' and this metric should measure it. It's very easy to calculate: divide the team's runs by the wickets fallen when the batsman comes to the crease and subtract from that the team's runs by wickets fallen when they get out. It should provide a fairly good measure of whether the batsman turned the game around while they were at the crease.

One limitation is that if a batsman is at the other end while a team mate makes match-changing runs, they would get credit. But if you think about it that is worth crediting, and since a player would be unlikely to consistently do that without making runs themselves, it's not such an issue.

Another limitation is how to measure situations where a batsman is not out. Not 100% sure how to solve that one, but it's not a big deal. 

2. Team runs per over at entry and exit

Same idea as above. This would be interesting in its ability to capture whether a batsman's coming to the crease corresponds with the team scoring more or less quickly. I think this stat is neutral (except in Twenty20) but highly explanatory.

Edit: This stat needs to be tweaked because it's harder to change the RPO later in the innings (i.e. 10 runs in an over in the second over impacts the RPO more than 10 runs in the 100th over). Perhaps measure RPO of runs at the crease against RPO before coming to the crease.

3. Maidens conceded

We hear that bowling maidens is crucial to building pressure for the bowling side. So it makes sense to try to find out which batsmen concede the most. Perhaps this is best expressed by taking balls faced divided by 6 (i.e. overs faced) and giving us maidens conceded as a percentage of that (i.e. what percentage of overs faced are maidens).

This is related to, but I think more useful thank a measure of dot balls as a percentage of balls faced.

4. Rest of team average while batsman at crease

It is often said that some batsmen bring out the best in their batting partners. Usman Khawaja said that batting with Ricky Ponting in Johannesburg was invaluable. It was said that Steve Waugh brought out the best in tail enders by refusing to farm the strike while he was batting with them.

These sorts of claims would be very easy to quantify by measuring the average of the other batsmen while that batsman was at the crease. Just take the runs scored by those at the other end and divide by the wickets that fall while the batsman is at the crease.

5. Scoring shot efficiency

We can broadly say that playing scoring shots in cricket involves more risk than blocking or leaving the ball. And further we can broadly say that a better batsman will find bigger gaps and hit them harder than a lesser batsman. 

So we should measure how many runs a batsman scores on average from shots that they score from. In other words, if it's not a dot ball, what does the batsman score on average?

Bowling

1. Strike rate in team's next over

We often hear that some bowlers might not take wickets, but that they help the team take wickets by creating pressure or chances at the other end. This isn't too hard to measure. We currently measure the bowler's strike rate - how many balls on average they need to take a wicket. So if we want to see whether they let others cash in at the other end, we should just take the strike rate of the overs immediately after those bowled by the bowler. 

For that matter we could take the average, economy rate etc of the overs immediately following as well. 

2. Maidens percentage

If maidens are so important, we should see how many of a bowler's overs are maidens as a percentage. Too easy.

We can add to that the percentage of consecutive maidens and triple consecutive maidens (which John Buchanan found massively increase the chance of a wicket).

3. Scoring shot strike rate

The inverse of the scoring shot efficiency metric for batsmen. Look at how many runs a bowler concedes on balls from which runs are scored. In shorter forms, where economy rates are equal, you would probably prefer this number to be higher. That would mean batsmen are facing more dot balls and then hitting bigger shots - which broadly would mean taking bigger chances. In longer forms you'd probably prefer a lower number, meaning that there are fewer pressure-relieving boundaries.

4. Strike rate in first over of spells

Commentators are fond of saying of Graeme Swann that one of his strengths is his ability to take wickets in the first over of a spell. This is easy to measure. Just take the wickets in first overs of spells generate a strike rate from it. Again this could be done to give an average and economy rate in first overs of spells.

5. Innings result compared to projected innings result for individual bowler

The result of this metric would be similar to an average but would better capture situations where someone leads an attack even if it doesn't produce good career stats.

The way to measure this is to take the average runs per wicket for each innings a bowler bowls and subtract it from the runs per wicket for the whole innings. Then sum those differences for a player's career.

For instance, if someone takes 2/50 in an innings of 300 then their difference is 5 (300/10 = 30  minus 50/2 = 25). Compare that to someone who takes 2/50 in an innings of 200, where the difference is -5.

Edit: this needs to be weighted by wickets (for average) or overs (for economy rate and strike rate). It should be weighted by the percentage (i.e. 10 overs in 100 over innings is the difference by .1, 3 wickets in 9 wicket innings is difference *.33).

So what this would capture is whether bowlers consistently over perform or under perform their team mates. In particular it would help to correct for bowlers who play a lot of their cricket in conditions that are friendly or unfriendly to bowlers. 

Again, this could be replicated for economy rate and strike rate.

Final thoughts

These stats are probably not going to be that useful in finding out which players are the greatest. But I think they would do a huge amount to split players with similar surface stats. In situations where selectors are tossing up between lots of similarly-credentialled players - as they were before the first test - a discussion of these stats should illuminate important differences.

Weekend reading!

Sorry that all I'm doing at the moment is posting links, but absent the time to do anything more, I figure this is better than my usual total neglect of the blog!

• Quora is a the latest and greatest social media tool. It lets people ask, give and rate answers to questions. I joined last year and found it very narrow. Most of the questions were about running a tech startup! But since then apparently it's broadened a lot. Hard to see it being a breakout, because it's pretty nerdy. Then again, so was early Twitter! Anyway, here's their attempt to figure out whether Jay Z's 'legal advice' in 99 Problems is useful. HT Kottke.
• Kevin Drum advances the 'Unified Theory of Republican Flip-Flops' - taking their temporary adoption of policies they now oppose (like cap and trade) as tactics adopted only to fight off more liberal proposals. He rebuts Ezra Klein's argument that they're driven by animosity toward President Obama.
• A moving account of Saddam Hussein's last minutes leaves him as the one with dignity and his executors as the monsters. 
• Ezra Klein christens the 'No-Brainer awards' for policy proposals that are... no-brainers. I'm not sure everyone would agree, but they probably are amongst his audience. The taxpayer receipt is a great policy I'd love to see implemented in Australia. 
• It turns out that Liberal MP Jamie Briggs has previously supported buying set top boxes for seniors, the policy last night dubbed by Tony Abbott 'Building the Entertainment Revolution'. His speech in favour makes limited sense and basically consists of saying people need this, therefore the government should provide it. It's unclear why that is a sufficient argument for any government spending, let alone something as stupid as this.

That's all for me folks. Have a great weekend.

Interesting things to read

In lieu of a more substantive post, here are some things that caught my eye over the last couple of days.

• Since the Chinese government runs the world's largest censorship regime, they of course have to publish directives to media about what they're not to publish. And of course, those directives are now regularly leaked... which kind of defeats the purpose. They make for fascinating reading. HT Bleeding Heart Libertarians.
• What's the first thing the world's newest country, South Sudan, should do? Give everyone over 12 some cash and establish universal catastrophic health coverage, apparently.
• Tim Carmody at Kottke.org tells us why we wanted to believe in fake Martin Luther King Jr quotes after OBL's assassination. 
• Matt Yglesias on the economic integration of schools. I think this is a fascinating policy proposal and a worthwhile goal for public school systems
• An Australian cheerleader in the IPL has been sacked over her tell-all blog about players' behaviour behind the scenes. 

Finally, here's Inception (one of the most overrated films in recent memory, in my opinion) explained via Mac OS X folders. Very clever. 

INCEPTION_FOLDER from chris baker on Vimeo.

My favourite quote on all things Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

I think this was discussed on the Slate Culturefest a couple of weeks ago. It's a great quote. I found it online here, but I can't find a reliable origin point. 

Now the PM has got on the 2bn watched the royal wedding bandwagon

As John Quiggin, and others, have pointed out it is extremely unlikely that 2bn people watched Kate and William Windsor's wedding. 

The PM just repeated the number on indulgence in Question Time. 

I mean... come ON!

Donald Trump is an idiot: The audience of Celebrity Apprentice is the most liberal on US TV edition

Via The Atlantic, it seems that the audience of Celebrity Apprentice is the most liberal on TV. So of course his recent birth-laced tilt at the Republican presidential nomination hasn't been great for ratings.  

Trump being a moron aside, this chart makes for some fascinating reading. It plots Democrat-Republican scale on the horizontal axis and turnout index (i.e. more or less likely than average to vote) on the vertical axis.

A few interesting points to take from it:

•  Family Guy has the least voting audience.
• 30 Rock has one of the most liberal audiences and one of the highest voting.
• The Mentalist's audience votes the most, followed by the Office.
• The two shows with the most Republican audience are NCAA Football and NFL Football.

Interesting things to read & some music

I'm keen to keep up the frequency of posts here, even though I lack the time to write lots of new content. The solution, I've decided, is to return to my old practice of posting links to interesting things I've read on the web.

Here's some for today:

• Matt Yglesias calls out false equivalence in media reporting on Medicare reform. It's not demagoguery to call New Gingrich in favour of letting Medicare 'wither on the vine' because that's exactly what he said he wanted to happen.
• Matt again with a great take on the EU crisis. It doesn't make sense to laud the Germans as responsible savers and the PIGS as profligate spenders since the Germans were loaning their savings without thinking about whether the PIGS could afford the debt.
• My favourite entry so far from a great new Tublr: Shit My Students Write.
• The children living near Osama's compound understood incentives - 50 rupees for a new ball every time they kicked one over the fence. 
• It seems you can't tell the difference between expensive and cheap wine, but you can experience it differently if you know whether it was cheap or expensive. Start ripping off those price stickers!

Finally, if you haven't already you should grab an (electronic) copy of TV on the Radio's new album, Nine Types of Light. This is the first track, Second Song, and it's a belter.

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/05/the-myth-of-the-responsible-saver/

Being articulate is not the same as having something to say - Paul Keating and Bob Ellis syndrome

This week I've read contributions to the public debate by Paul Keating and Bob Ellis. Keating resigned his post as Chairperson of the Banangaroo design review panel after the Planning Minister, Brad Hazzard, told him to shut up and stop denigrating people who disagree with him. Ellis wrote a relatively nonsensical piece about the death of Osama bin Laden. 

I don't think anyone would deny that these two men know how to write a sentence. They're both incredibly articulate. Witness this passage from Ellis' article:

Clearly they feared the sight of his widow, wounded in the fire-fight, at the graveside of him and his dead son, and the sight of his grieving daughter and his other sons would humanise him in an inconvenient way. Clearly they feared his grave would become, like that of Karl Marx or St Thomas a Beckett,  a pilgrim shrine for apostles yet unborn.

It's great prose. The unfortunate thing about both Ellis and Keating is that their contributions are well... shit. 

Ellis' last two big articles on The Drum have been terrible. Offensive, disjointed, poorly thought out and clearly written in half an hour over a bottle of red. (I have no idea whether Ellis even drinks - you get my drift). 

Keating, meanwhile, has been slagging off people who oppose his development vision for Banangaroo. Or I should say the development vision he bullied Kristina Keneally into accepting. Not with a substantive rebuttal of their arguments, but with pithy put downs. 

Now of course the media will report on or print the comments of famous people with a reputation for causing a stir. That's fine. I imagine for The Drum publishing Ellis is a necessary evil to drive traffic and justify the continued existence of the site. 

But I beg them to think about whether they should publish them. Jonathan Green, editor of The Drum, should've sent Ellis' article back to him and asked him to edit it. I mean it had a four paragraph P.S. at the end. And it was crap. I wonder whether the SMH should be putting Keating's shenanigans on the front page. Sure, he was once Prime Minister, but the happenings on the Banangaroo design review board don't strike me as front page news.

As these two men age, they are becoming less relevant to Australian public life. The fact they're still willing to mouth off about their opponents doesn't change that.

What's the political point of plain cigarette packaging?

The government announced today that it will push ahead with plans to force all cigarettes sold in Australia to be packaged in the same olive packages. A friend commented to me that the new minimalist packaging, in the colour of the season to boot, was actually quite appealing to him, though I doubt hipsters are the target of this policy.

In all seriousness though, it is far from clear that this is a good idea. Smoking rates in Australia have fallen since the government banned various forms of cigarette advertising in the 80s. Smoking among those aged 14 and over has fallen from 30.5% of the population in 1988 to 16.6% of the population in 2007. That has obviously been a great result - letting adults choose behaviours and products that harm their health is probably a necessary incident of freedom, but letting companies manipulatively peddle addictive products to addicts probably isn't. 

But it seems that the argument for plain packaging relies, at least in part, on thinking that standarising packaging - and therefore branding - is analogous to cutting advertising. Perhaps it is, but its effect will certainly be far more marginal. And as the cigarette lobby has pointed out, there's no actual evidence that plain packaging will work.

I think this policy is actually about politics, and the health benefits that may come will be a welcome bonus for the ALP. The first political benefit is that the government is seen to be doing something about a problem that most people want to see addressed. Indeed they can boast, as they have, that they're imposing the toughest laws in the world. I've little sympathy for this kind of political pandering - especially when it's based on stripping the rights of unpopular groups who are none the less law abiding. (Populism, even when directed against criminal groups is usually distasteful.)

However the bigger political benefit, as I see it, is that this issue wedges the Liberals in a quite spectacular fashion. On the one hand, there is definitely some milage for the Liberals in opposing this is big government overreach. But at the same time, the Liberals accept political donations from tobacco companies. This morning, when they equivocated on the policy, Nicola Roxon was straight at them, saying: "There is a clear question for Mr Abbott today: will you join with the Gillard government or will you continue to be in the pocket of big tobacco and accept their donations?"

That, I think, is what's really behind this policy. If the Liberals oppose it, they can be painted as stooges of big tobacco. If they support it, they may well have to kiss goodbye to some or all of their tobacco donations. Political donations are a bit like your dirty washing - they never look very good when the media explores every single item. Having the political debate focus for days or weeks on how much cash the Liberals take from big tobacco could be more than they can take. 

Maybe I'm a cynic, but I think this government deserves to have its policies, and the timing of their announcement, scrutinised for political manoeuvres. And I'm a little too cynical to believe that this announcement, coming in a week where the government has been distracted by Kevin Rudd, is both pure coincidence and pure policy.

#lolstralian quotes jokes by Tina Fey as newsworthy admissions that mocking Sarah Palin hurt 30 Rock's ratings

This is surreal. In a interview about her forthcoming book, Tiny Fey cracked some jokes about her impersonation of Sarah Palin. The Australian, Australia's most serious broadsheet, reported her jokes as admissions that she had erred.

It quotes an excerpt of the book from USA Today that reads "Some may argue that exploiting Governor Palin and her family helped bring attention to my low-rated TV show...I am proud to say you are wrong. My TV show still enjoys very low ratings." That presumably supports the article's headline: 'Sarah Palin impersonation may have hurt 30 Rock ratings, Tina Fey says'.

Um... no she didn't. Or, if we take that excerpt as representative of Fey's honest and serious feelings, I think the biggest headline is that she admits to exploiting Palin and her family.

The #lolstralian pushes on:

Fey said she believes "the Palin stuff" negatively affected comedy show 30 Rock.

"Let's face it, between (co-star) Alec Baldwin and me there is a certain fifty percent of the population who think we are pinko Commie monsters," she wrote.

Really? Does that quote really support the statement above it? Dear God, I'm changing my bookmarks to news.com.au...

Despite its relatively low ratings, 30 Rock earns rave reviews from critics and has been nominated for multiple Emmy Awards. It was renewed by NBC for a sixth season.