Strike rate hides the balls a batter never faced

A number built on the deliveries a player received says nothing about the ones he arranged to avoid.

Two batters finish on forty from thirty. One walked in at the second over against a swinging new ball. The other walked in at the sixteenth with the field out and the shine gone. The scorecard treats them as equals and so, mostly, does every rate statistic we use.

Strike rate is a ratio of runs to balls faced, and the problem sits in the denominator. It counts what a batter received, and it has no way of representing what he did not receive, which for a middle order player is a decision made by the men above him and by the clock. Batting phase is the largest single influence on how quickly anyone can score, larger than technique, larger than power, and it is not in the number at all.

Phase adjusted numbers exist and are better. They still miss a stranger effect, which is that a batter can manipulate his own denominator. Refusing a single to keep the strike, or taking one to give it away, changes who faces the next ball. A player who consistently declines to farm the strike against a bowler he cannot handle will post a healthier strike rate than the teammate who takes those balls on his behalf, and the second man has helped the team more.

I am not arguing the number is useless. It is the best quick description of a modern innings we have. I am arguing it is a description rather than an assessment, and that the gap between those two words is where a lot of selection goes wrong, because a selector under time pressure reads a column and a column cannot tell him that a player scores at that rate only when someone else has already taken the new ball away.

The version I would actually build compares a batter to the scoring rate available to him at the moment he arrived, given the overs left and the wickets down. Runs above what the situation offered. That is harder to compute and nobody will put it on a graphic.

Until then, my rule is simple and slightly rude. Never compare two strike rates without checking the over number in which each innings started. Half of what looks like aggression is a timetable.