Every once in a while, I'm gonna try and take a look at a cricket stat that intrigues me. This post it'll be batting average.
Being a newbie to cricket, Don Bradman was one of the first people I found to read about. It mainly came about through reading about different cricket stats, and seing just how insanely far he was ahead of everyone else in 'batting average.'
Coming from a baseball backgound, the term 'batting average' was very familiar to me. It's the number of hits you get divided by the number of at-bats you have. As time went on, I saw that batting average has its flaws. The formula for cricket batting average is just as simple. The number of runs you score divided by the number of times you get out. But the cricket version didn't seem quite as flawed.
Of course using it in a small sample size could give mixed up results. But the players that have batting averages in the high 40s and 50s, over years of playing, are generally considered great players.
But the more I think about it, the more I realize it does have some flaws. Bradman's 99.94 technically means he should score 99 or 100 every innings, but he never actually scored 99 or 100 runs in an innings. His average is exaclty that, an average. Scores way above that raised it, but scores below it lowered that. In fact, he only has 3 scores within 10 runs of his average, one 102 and a pair of 103s.
Sachin Tendulkar averages 56.95 in tests, and does have a bunch of scores right around that number, but there are far more scores below that, and far more above that.
That got me thinking. If the averages of an entire team were added up, how close could their score from an innings match up to it.
