The free hit is wasted and the batting side is to blame

A delivery on which you cannot be bowled or caught is treated as an invitation to slog rather than a puzzle to solve.

One ball. Cannot be bowled, cannot be caught, cannot be stumped, cannot be leg before. The only ways out are run out and hit wicket, both of which require the batter to do something ridiculous. And the average return on it is nowhere near what that licence is worth.

The usual approach is to swing as hard as possible, which is understandable and, I think, wrong more often than it is right. Swinging hard maximises the chance of six and also the chance of missing entirely, and a dot ball on a free hit is a genuinely terrible outcome. It is the one delivery in cricket where contact is guaranteed to be safe, so the batter should be optimising for contact quality rather than bat speed.

The bowler, meanwhile, has an easy job and knows it. He bowls a wide yorker or a slower ball into the pitch, the batter has already committed to a heave, and the ball goes for one. I would like to see more batters treat the free hit as a chance to premeditate a specific area instead. Back away and hit through the covers, or move across and work it fine, both of which are far more likely to produce four than a swing at a delivery aimed at the toes.

There is a stranger option almost nobody uses. Since you cannot be caught, the ramp and the reverse sweep become effectively riskless in a way they never otherwise are, and both send the ball to parts of the field that a death field leaves empty. The failure mode of a ramp is a top edge. On a free hit a top edge is not out.

Field placement gets ignored too. Batters look at the field for the free hit, notice it is spread, and swing anyway. If long on and long off are back and the ring is up, the highest value shot might be a firmly hit two into the gap, which is worth more than a fifty percent chance at four.

Free hits are rare. Perhaps two or three an innings. Getting six runs out of them instead of three is a small edge, and small edges are the entire margin in most of these games.