What's so great about a batting average?

[chinaman_f]

Ed Cowan may not have done enough with the Bat to find a place in Australia's national squad, but he sure has his share of writing skills, and he posts an argument that i have been trying to, only not in an organized manner as his.

Cricket has always fancied itself a deeply statistical game, yet somehow has become increasingly bogged down in small categories of data, giving little to no thought as to how meaningful they are. Thanks in part to Michael Lewis' gift of storytelling, the word Moneyball is now not only synonymous with baseball but commonplace within business parlance to signify thinking outside current evaluation parameters. Considering the similar cadences and skill sets of baseball and cricket, it can't be long before cricket too has an overhaul of its archaic statistical processes and starts to measure what is relevant rather than simply what is easy.

That is not to say the game has completely ignored the ideas of Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics - both Andy Flower and James Sutherland have publicly recognised that cricket is light on deep performance analysis.

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My last thread in this section was a stub. I meekly hope this one does better.