Explainer
Batting average vs strike rate: what each one measures
Batting average and strike rate divide by different things. Why not-outs inflate an average, why Tests weight one and T20 the other, and what both hide.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Updated Explainer19 min read
Somebody will tell you this week that the batting average is a dead statistic, and somebody else will tell you that strike rate is a fashion that will pass. Both arguments get made with total confidence, and both fail in the same way. They assume the two figures are rival answers to one question.
They are answers to two questions. Batting average is runs per dismissal. Strike rate is runs per hundred balls. One divides by wickets, the other divides by deliveries, and the whole batting average vs strike rate argument is a category error the moment somebody asks which of them is better. A car's fuel consumption is not better or worse than its top speed. They are different measurements of different things, and which one you care about depends on whether you are short of petrol or short of time.
Cricket publishes both because cricket is the only major sport in which the resource that runs out first changes depending on the format you are watching. That single fact explains almost everything that follows.
Batting average vs strike rate: what each fraction divides by
Write the two definitions next to each other and the difference stops being a matter of opinion.
Batting average = runs scored ÷ times dismissed. The denominator is wickets. The figure answers: how many runs does the side get in exchange for this batter's wicket?
Strike rate = (runs scored ÷ balls faced) × 100. The denominator is deliveries. The figure answers: how many runs does the side get in exchange for a hundred balls given to this batter?
Both fractions have runs on top. Everything that distinguishes them sits underneath. And the reason both exist is that a batting side spends two entirely separate resources at once. It has ten wickets and it has some number of balls, and it scores by consuming both. A batter is a machine that converts wickets and deliveries into runs, and the two figures are the two exchange rates.
Which exchange rate matters is decided by which resource the format makes scarce.
- 10Wickets available in any innings
- 120Balls in a standard Twenty20 innings
- 300Balls in a standard fifty-over innings
- 4Overs one bowler may bowl in a T20 innings
Structural limits set by the playing conditions for each format. A Test innings has no ball limit at all, which is exactly why its scarce resource is the other one.
The block above is the whole argument in four numbers. Ten wickets is a constant across every format ever played. The ball count is not. In a Test it is effectively unbounded, in a fifty-over innings it is 300, in a Twenty20 innings it is 120. Hold the wickets fixed and squeeze the deliveries, and you change which of the two exchange rates a team should be optimising. Nothing about batting technique changes. The arithmetic of scarcity changes.
What the batting average is really claiming
The average divides by dismissals, not by innings. That detail is where most of the confusion begins, and it is deliberate rather than accidental.
The reasoning behind it is sound. An average is meant to answer a forward-looking question: if this batter walks out now, how many runs will arrive before somebody gets him out? An innings that ended because the overs ran out, or because the last partner was dismissed at the other end, or because the captain declared, did not end because the batter failed. Counting it as a completed failure would understate him every single time.
So the convention is that a not-out innings contributes its runs to the numerator and nothing to the denominator. Runs banked, wicket not spent.
There is a small family of edge cases worth knowing, because they show that the convention is about whether the wicket was taken, not about whether the batter walked off. A batter who retires hurt has not been dismissed and is recorded not out. A batter who retires without the umpires' consent is recorded retired out, and that does count as a dismissal even though no bowler is credited. Being run out counts, obstructing the field counts, timed out counts. The test is always the same: did the fielding side actually get him?
That reasoning holds cleanly for a top-order batter who is occasionally stranded. It breaks down badly for a lower-order batter who is stranded as a matter of routine, and the size of the break is much larger than most people assume.
The not-out problem, with the arithmetic on the table
Take a constructed number nine. Invented figures, round enough to follow.
He bats in twelve innings. He is dismissed in six of them, scoring 12, 4, 22, 8, 15 and 3. In the other six the innings ends around him and he finishes unbeaten on 9, 14, 2, 18, 6 and 11.
Total runs: 124. Innings: 12. Dismissals: 6.
Runs per innings: 124 ÷ 12 = 10.33. Batting average: 124 ÷ 6 = 20.67.
The number has exactly doubled without a single additional run being scored.
Nothing improper has happened. The formula was applied precisely as defined, and the resulting figure is not a lie. It genuinely is true that this batter costs the opposition roughly 21 runs per wicket. What it is not is a description of the size of his typical innings, which is what almost every reader instinctively takes an average to mean. He has never once made 20 in his life. His average says 20.67.
The distortion scales with three things, and it is worth being precise about each.
The proportion of innings ending not out. This is the dominant term, and the relationship is not gentle. Not out in a quarter of innings and the average sits about a third above runs per innings. Not out in half of them and the average is double. Not out in two thirds and it is triple. The inflation is not linear, it accelerates, which is why the batters furthest down the order are affected out of all proportion.
Batting position. The lower a batter comes in, the more often the innings ends while he is still there, and the more often a senior partner farms the strike to keep him off it. Both effects push in the same direction.
Format. A limited-overs innings has a hard stop, so somebody is always unbeaten when it finishes. This is a structural guarantee, not a tendency. Middle and lower-order white-ball averages are therefore systematically inflated relative to Test averages at the same position, and comparing across the two without adjusting is close to meaningless. The wider differences between the formats are worth understanding on their own terms, because each one sets a different problem for a batting side.
The same rule applied to an opener
Now run the identical treatment on a constructed opener, so that the not-out convention is not blamed for something it does not do.
Twelve innings, eleven dismissals, one not out. Dismissed scores of 62, 8, 105, 31, 4, 44, 77, 19, 52, 26 and 15, plus an unbeaten 37 when the declaration came.
Total runs: 480. Innings: 12. Dismissals: 11.
Runs per innings: 480 ÷ 12 = 40.00. Batting average: 480 ÷ 11 = 43.64.
A gap of 3.64 runs, about nine per cent. For this batter the average is doing exactly the job it was designed to do: correcting a small, genuine understatement caused by an innings that ended for reasons outside his control. The same convention that produces a nine per cent adjustment for the opener produces a hundred per cent adjustment for the number nine.
That is the point, and it is the part usually skipped. The not-out rule is not broken. It is correct at the top of the order and increasingly misleading as you move down, because the rule assumes the batter's innings normally ends when he is dismissed, and for a number nine that assumption is simply false half the time.
The counter-check is trivial and every decent statistics page gives you the pieces for it. Divide runs by innings, not by dismissals, and hold the two figures side by side. If they are close, the average is telling you something honest about the size of the innings this batter plays. If runs per dismissal sits far above runs per innings, the gap is being manufactured by role rather than by run-scoring, and the average is describing a job description.
A specialist finisher who walks in with four overs left, is unbeaten far more often than not, and is picked precisely because he does not get out at the death, will always carry a headline average well above what he typically contributes in a single appearance. That is not deception. It is a number correctly answering a question almost nobody was asking.
What one not-out innings does to each figure
The clearest demonstration that the two measures are independent is to push a single innings through both and watch them move in opposite directions.
- Before the inningsThe batter has 300 runs from 12 innings, dismissed 10 times, off 250 balls faced. Average 30.00. Strike rate 120.00.
- He comes in with 14 balls leftThe innings is nearly over. He will face whatever is left, and the overs rather than the bowlers will end his afternoon.
- He finishes 8 not out from 12 ballsNobody got him out. The scorers record an unbeaten innings, so no dismissal is added to the denominator.
- The average recalculates308 runs, still 10 dismissals. 308 divided by 10 is 30.80. The average has risen by 0.80 on the back of eight runs.
- The strike rate recalculates308 runs from 262 balls. That is 117.56 per hundred. The strike rate has fallen by nearly two and a half points.
- The same eight runs, two verdictsThe average improved because the wicket was not spent. The strike rate worsened because the deliveries were. Both figures are correct and they disagree, because they measure different resources.
Constructed example. The batter's figures before this innings are invented; the arithmetic afterwards is exact. Both measures are recomputed from the same eight runs, and they move opposite ways.
Eight runs made him a better batter by one measure and a worse one by the other, on the same afternoon, without anybody forming a judgement about how he played. Once you have watched that happen, the idea that one figure is a superior version of the other becomes hard to hold.
Batting average vs strike rate in Tests, where wickets are the scarce resource
A Test innings has no ball limit. The side bats until ten wickets fall or the captain declares, and there are minimum over requirements per day rather than a cap on how many the batting side may consume. The only thing that ends an innings against the batting side's will is the loss of wickets.
So wickets are scarce, and the average is the exchange rate on the scarce resource. Everything about how Test batting is valued follows from that one line rather than from tradition.
Three consequences are worth spelling out.
Occupation has value that appears in no batting figure at all. A batter who bats through a long session denies the bowling side the thing it needs, tires the quicks, ages the ball, brings the second new ball closer, and hands the incoming batter a softer ball and a flatter surface. None of that shows up in a strike rate, and only some of it shows up in an average. A side chasing twenty wickets in five days has a finite supply of fresh bowling, and a batter who spends four hours has burned a real quantity of it.
Tempo in Tests is contextual rather than constant. There are passages where a batter is right to score at a crawl, because the ball is moving and survival is the entire job. There are passages on the fourth evening where the same batter should score faster than he would in a one-day innings, because a declaration is coming and the runs have a deadline. A career Test strike rate averages those opposite instructions into one figure that describes neither of them. It is not that the number is wrong. It is that it is an average of two contradictory briefs.
Strike rate in Tests is a second-order question, not a non-question. It separates a batter who scores briskly enough to leave his bowlers time to take twenty wickets from one whose slow accumulation quietly converts winnable matches into draws. A side that bats 150 overs for a total has done something materially different from a side that bats 110 overs for the same score, and the difference is roughly a session of bowling time. Test strike rate is best read as a measure of how much time a batting side is buying or spending, rather than as a measure of aggression.
The primary question in a format with unlimited balls remains how many runs a wicket is worth. That is the average, and no amount of white-ball habit changes the arithmetic of the constraint.
Batting average vs strike rate in T20, where balls are the scarce resource
Reverse the scarcity and the hierarchy reverses with it. A Twenty20 innings has 120 balls and ten wickets, and in most innings the balls run out with wickets still in hand. Deliveries are scarce. Wickets, in the aggregate, are not.
This changes the price of a dismissal in a way that is easy to state and hard to internalise. In a Test, getting out costs the side a tenth of its innings. In a T20, getting out in the fourteenth over costs considerably less than a tenth of anything, because the replacement is also capable of scoring quickly and because the innings was going to finish at ball 120 regardless of who was standing there. The penalty for being dismissed is real, but it is small relative to the penalty for consuming deliveries slowly.
Work through the cleanest version of it.
Batter A and Batter B have identical entries in the runs column. Batter B has handed his side twenty extra deliveries, and those twenty deliveries are worth roughly two overs of scoring at whatever rate the team was managing anyway. The two men's averages are identical. Their contributions are not close.
Slow batting in T20 does something worse than scoring fewer runs. It exports the deficit. The batters who follow must now score faster than they otherwise would to reach the same total, which means taking more risk, which means getting out more often. The cost of a low strike rate frequently shows up in somebody else's dismissal column, and neither figure on the scorecard records the transfer.
This is also why the low-average finisher is so persistently underrated by anyone reading the headline numbers. Set a middle-order batter averaging in the low twenties at a strike rate near 160 beside an opener averaging in the high thirties at 125, and the finisher looks like the lesser player. Very often he is not, for four reasons the statistics do not record.
He bats in the hardest overs, against the best death bowlers in the side, to defensive fields, with yorkers and slower balls at his toes. The scoring is faster because he is taking more risk against better bowling, not because the batting got easier.
His job guarantees dismissals. A player instructed to attack from ball one will get out more often than one instructed to assess, and every one of those dismissals lands in the denominator at full weight while the successful version of the identical shot is credited only as runs.
He faces very few balls per appearance, so his innings-by-innings scores are naturally small and volatile, which drags an average down independently of quality. A batter averaging 22 from appearances that are typically fifteen balls long is operating at a rate the opener would have to sustain a strike rate near 145 to match over the same span.
And his runs arrive when they are worth most. Twenty runs in the nineteenth over are not interchangeable with twenty in the fifth. They are scored against a side that has already committed its plans and set its fields, and in a chase they are the runs the fielding captain has no answers left for. Neither average nor strike rate is weighted by when in the innings the runs happened.
Fifty overs, where the binding constraint moves mid-innings
The one-day game is not a compromise between the other two. It is the format in which the scarce resource actually changes during the innings, which is why it is the hardest of the three to assess with either figure alone.
At the start of a fifty-over innings, wickets are the binding constraint. There are 300 balls available, which is more than enough time to build a total, and the way to fail is to lose four wickets inside the first ten overs and spend the next thirty rebuilding. Early on, an ODI innings behaves like a short Test: survive the new ball, score at a rate that does not embarrass you, and preserve the resource that cannot be replaced.
By the fortieth over the constraint has flipped completely. Balls are now scarce and wickets are not, and a set batter protecting his wicket at that point is destroying value. The correct behaviour at ball 240 is the opposite of the correct behaviour at ball 30, and it is the same batter being asked to do both.
The fielding restrictions are built to force exactly this shape. The first ten overs allow only two fielders outside the circle, the middle overs allow four, and the last ten allow five. A batting side is therefore handed cheap boundaries early, made to work for them in the middle, and then asked to find them again at the death against a spread field. The way the powerplay overs are structured in each format is not decoration, it is the mechanism that decides when each resource becomes scarce.
The consequence for the two figures is that an ODI career average and an ODI career strike rate each summarise a set of instructions that reversed halfway through every innings the batter played. Both figures retain real meaning, which is why serious assessment of fifty-over batting reads them together and refuses to rank on either alone. Anyone ranking ODI batters on average alone is scoring the first twenty overs. Anyone ranking on strike rate alone is scoring the last fifteen.
A strike rate quoted without a phase tells you almost nothing
Here is the single most abused number in cricket broadcasting: a career T20 strike rate, presented as a property of the batter.
It is not a property of the batter. It is a weighted average of his performance in three different jobs, weighted by how many balls he happened to face in each, and the same figure carries opposite meanings depending on which of those jobs he actually does.
A Twenty20 innings splits into three phases that the playing conditions themselves create.
- Powerplay, overs 1 to 636
- Middle overs, 7 to 1554
- Death overs, 16 to 2030
Rule-defined. The first six overs are the powerplay, with at most two fielders outside the circle; the remaining fourteen allow five. The phases are set by the fielding restrictions, not by convention.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Powerplay, overs 1 to 6 | 36 |
| Middle overs, 7 to 15 | 54 |
| Death overs, 16 to 20 | 30 |
Three phases, three different games.
In the powerplay, only two fielders are permitted outside the circle. The field is the most attackable it will ever be, and the ball is hardest, newest and most likely to move. A high strike rate here is bought with genuine risk against the new ball, but the boundaries are there to be found. A batter striking at 130 in the first six overs is doing something moderately good, not remarkable.
In the middle overs, the field spreads to five outside the circle, spin arrives, and boundary options shrink sharply. This is where the game is quietly won and lost, because a batter striking at 130 through overs seven to fifteen against a set field and two spinners has done something genuinely difficult. The identical number that was moderate in the powerplay is excellent here.
At the death, the field is spread, the bowlers are the specialists, and the batter has explicit licence to fail. A strike rate of 130 in the last five overs is poor. Not modest. Poor. It is below what the phase demands, and the batter would be doing his side a favour by getting out and letting somebody else have a swing.
So the same figure, 130, is moderate in one phase, excellent in another and inadequate in the third. A career strike rate blends all three according to an accident of where the batter usually walks in, and then gets quoted as though it described a skill level.
The correction is straightforward and every professional analyst applies it. Split the strike rate by phase, and read each split against what the rest of the match produced in that same phase on that same ground. A death strike rate of 150 at a venue where nobody clears the rope is worth more than 180 at a ground where the boundaries are short and the ball is coming on. Where the vocabulary here is unfamiliar, the glossary of cricket statistics sets the terms out in one place.
The same innings, excellent or negligent, depending on the scoreboard
Neither figure knows the score. This is the largest single hole in both of them, and it is not a small one.
Consider one constructed innings: 30 from 40 balls in a T20. Strike rate 75. On the face of it, an innings that cost the side ten deliveries of scoring.
Now place it. If the side was 12 for 4 in the fourth over on a surface where the ball was seaming sideways, and this innings carried the score to a position from which the last five overs could produce something, it is one of the more valuable contributions of the season. The batter absorbed the collapse, saw off the good bowling, and preserved wickets for a phase in which they could be spent profitably.
Place it differently. If the side was 90 for 1 after ten overs on a flat pitch chasing 190, the same 30 from 40 is close to negligent. It consumed a third of the remaining deliveries at half the required rate and left the incoming batters an impossible equation.
Identical entry on the scorecard. Identical contribution to both career figures. Opposite verdicts.
The same effect operates in Tests with the sign reversed. Sixty from 200 balls on the last afternoon of a match your side is trying to save is a superb innings. The identical sixty from 200 on the first morning of a match that needs a first-innings total, with the sun out and the pitch flat, is a poor one. The career strike rate cannot tell them apart, and neither can the average.
Match situation is not a refinement sitting on top of these figures. It is the variable that decides whether the figures point the right way at all, and it is entirely absent from both.
What neither number knows anything about
The gaps go well beyond situation, and they are worth listing precisely, because each one is a specific thing that gets thrown away.
Neither knows who was bowling. Runs against the fifth bowler on a flat surface and runs against a genuinely fast new-ball attack land in the same column at the same weight. This is the largest uncontrolled variable in both figures, and it is systematically unfair to batters from sides that play a harder schedule.
Neither knows the conditions. A seaming pitch under cloud, a turning fourth-day surface and a flat deck in a high-scoring competition all produce runs that are counted identically. Nothing in either figure adjusts for the ground, the era, or the standard of the attack. Averages from different decades sit in the same table as though the game had been constant.
Neither knows about luck. A batter dropped on four who goes on to a hundred, and a batter caught at slip off an equally good ball, are separated by a fielder's hands and by absolutely nothing in the arithmetic. Over a long career this washes out somewhat. Over a season it does not, and selection decisions get made on seasons.
Neither records the shape of the innings. A strike rate of 130 might come from a batter who scored steadily from the first ball, or from one who crawled for twenty-five deliveries and then hit four sixes. The second version leaves a much larger hole in the innings if the acceleration never arrives, and it is a genuinely riskier way of arriving at the same number.
Neither counts the balls a partner did not face. A batter farming the strike to protect a tail-ender improves his own strike rate by taking a larger share of the deliveries, and gives no hint that a teammate stood at the other end doing nothing for two overs. The same mechanism inflates the tail-ender's average by keeping him not out.
Neither values an end being occupied. A batter who is simply there, at the non-striker's end, unbothered, while the other man scores, has a measurable effect on the bowling side's plans and no representation whatsoever in his own figures.
Modern statistics answer some of this with more granular measures. Dot-ball percentage, boundary percentage, control percentage, false-shot rate, runs and dismissals split by bowling type, and strike rate by phase are all now routinely recorded. Those are the tools that begin to separate a batter from his circumstances, and the more of them a page offers, the less weight the two headline figures have to carry.
The attempts to fuse the two, and why none has taken over
People have been trying to collapse average and strike rate into one number for as long as both have existed. Understanding why the attempts have not stuck is more instructive than any of the attempts themselves.
The product, or batting index. Multiply average by strike rate and divide by a hundred. It is simple, it rewards both qualities, and it is the most common homemade fusion. Its problem is that it has no units and no meaning. It asserts that doubling your average and doubling your strike rate are equally valuable, which is false in every format, and false in opposite directions depending on the format. It also inherits the not-out distortion from the average and the phase-blindness from the strike rate, so it combines the flaws as efficiently as the virtues.
Difference from match par. Compute what everyone else scored in the same matches, in the same phases, and express a batter's figures as a difference from that baseline. This is a real improvement, and it is how most serious analysis handles conditions and era. It fixes the pitch problem and the scheduling problem. It does not fix the role problem, because a finisher and an opener are still being compared against baselines that are not doing the same job.
Ball-by-ball value models. Assign every delivery outcome a value in terms of its effect on the expected final score, or on win probability, and sum a batter's contribution across every ball he faced. This is unambiguously the best answer available. It handles phase, situation, target and the resource state directly, because those are the model's inputs. It is what serious analytics departments inside cricket teams actually run on.
It has also failed to replace the two headline figures, for three reasons that are not going away. It requires complete ball-by-ball data, which exists for recent matches and not for most of the sport's history. It is model-dependent, so two organisations produce different numbers for the same innings and there is no authority to arbitrate between them. And it cannot be computed by a person holding a scorecard, which means it cannot go on a scoreboard, into a newspaper, or into an argument in a pub.
That last constraint does more work than people expect. Golf managed a genuine replacement for its old summary statistics because the strokes gained framework has an unusually clean baseline: one player, one shot, a known field average from a known distance, and no interference from anybody else. Cricket has no equivalent. The value of a delivery depends on the balls remaining, the wickets remaining, the target, the surface, and what the batter at the other end is capable of. The units are entangled in a way golf's are not, which is why cricket's version of strokes gained keeps arriving as a proprietary product rather than as a public standard.
So the two old figures survive. They survive because they are computable by hand, stable across a century of records, comparable between any two players who ever lived, and honest about what they measure as long as the reader knows what that is.
How selectors and franchise analysts actually use them
The gap between how these numbers appear on a broadcast graphic and how they are used inside a selection meeting is enormous, and it is mostly a gap of context.
Nobody in a professional environment ranks batters on a career average. What gets pulled up instead is a set of splits, and the splits are chosen to match the specific question being asked. For a Test opener: record against pace and against spin, home and away, in the first twenty balls faced, in the fourth innings, against the moving ball. For a middle-order white-ball batter: strike rate and dismissal rate by phase, against each bowling type, with and without fielding restrictions in force.
Franchise auctions run on something narrower still. The question at an auction is never "is this a good batter". It is "does this player fill the specific slot we have left, at a price the remaining purse supports". A team that has already bought its powerplay hitter and its death finisher may have no use for the best available batter, because the role is taken and the squad has a fixed shape. Plenty of very good players go unsold for that reason and it says nothing at all about their figures.
The analytical work behind the bid tends to look like this.
Matchup rates rather than aggregate rates. Strike rate against left-arm orthodox in overs seven to fifteen, boundary percentage against pace at the death, dismissal rate against wrist spin. These are the numbers that decide whether a batter is bought, because they predict what will happen when a specific bowler is thrown at him in a specific over.
Sample-size discipline. Every one of those splits is thin. A batter's record against a particular bowling type in a particular phase might rest on a couple of hundred balls, which is not enough to distinguish skill from noise. Serious departments handle this by setting minimum ball thresholds and by pulling small samples back toward a sensible prior rather than reading them at face value. The alternative is paying a great deal of money for a fortnight.
Baselines from the same matches. A batter's figures get compared against what the rest of the competition produced on the same grounds in the same seasons, because a strike rate earned on a slow pitch in a low-scoring tournament is not the same asset as the identical figure earned somewhere the ball flies.
Behaviour under specific pressure. Ball-by-ball records make it possible to ask how a batter has performed when the required rate exceeded a threshold, or after early wickets, or in the second innings of a chase under lights. These are the questions selectors were always trying to answer with an average, and now they can be asked directly instead.
Everything that is not batting. Fielding, availability, overseas-slot cost, whether he can bowl two overs, whether he keeps. A squad is a portfolio and the batting figures are one column in it.
The broadcast graphic carries two numbers because two numbers fit on the screen. The people making the decision are looking at forty, and every one of them is a conditioned version of the same two ideas: how expensive is his wicket, and how fast do the runs come. Understanding the full anatomy of a scorecard is the entry point to all of it, because every one of those splits is built from the same raw fields.
Reading a batting line properly in three seconds
Most of the value in both figures is available quickly, if you look at them in the right order.
One. Check the innings count. Both measures are noisy over small samples, and a spectacular figure over a handful of innings is almost always noise rather than signal. Nothing after this step matters if the sample is thin.
Two. Compare not-outs to innings. A high ratio means the average is being lifted by where the batter bats rather than by how well he bats. Divide runs by innings as a sanity check. The gap between that figure and the average is the size of the correction you should be applying in your head.
Three. Look at balls faced per innings alongside the strike rate. This tells you whether a high rate was earned over a meaningful span or accumulated in cameos, and it tells you immediately which of the three T20 phases the batter actually lives in.
Four. Ask what the format is short of. Where wickets are scarce, weight the average. Where balls are scarce, weight the strike rate. Where both bind, as they do in fifty-over cricket, insist on both and distrust anyone ranking on one.
Five. Treat a large gap between the two as information rather than as a contradiction. A high average with a low strike rate describes an accumulator. A low average with a high strike rate describes a risk-taker. Neither is a fault. Which one a side needs depends entirely on the other ten names on the team sheet, and a side full of either is a badly built side.
Neither number is a verdict, and neither was ever meant to be one. They are summaries, and a summary works by discarding exactly the detail that made the innings what it was. The reader who knows what has been discarded gets far more out of the two columns than the reader who treats them as a scoreline.
The bowler's side of the same problem has an identical structure and a third figure to complicate it, which is set out in bowling economy, average and strike rate. More explanation of how the game actually works, statistical and otherwise, sits in the cricket archive.
Common questions
What is the difference between batting average and strike rate?
Batting average is runs divided by dismissals, so it measures how many runs a side gets for each wicket the batter costs. Strike rate is runs divided by balls faced, multiplied by 100, so it measures how fast those runs arrive. They use different denominators and answer different questions, which is why a batter can rate highly on one and modestly on the other with no contradiction.
Why do not outs increase a batting average?
Because an innings that ends without a dismissal adds runs to the top of the fraction and nothing to the bottom. A batter who scores 124 runs in twelve innings but is dismissed only six times averages 20.67 rather than the 10.33 he actually contributes per appearance. The formula is being applied correctly, but the figure now describes the cost of his wicket rather than the size of his typical innings.
Is batting average or strike rate more important?
It depends entirely on which resource the format runs out of first. A Test innings has ten wickets and no ball limit, so wickets are scarce and the average carries the weight. A Twenty20 innings has 120 balls and usually finishes with wickets in hand, so deliveries are scarce and the strike rate carries the weight. In fifty-over cricket both bind, and ranking on either alone is unsafe.
What counts as a ball faced in cricket?
Every legal delivery the batter receives counts, and so does a no ball, because the batter still had something to deal with. A wide does not count, because the delivery was out of reach and the batter had no opportunity to score from it. This is why a batter bowled at repeatedly outside the tramlines does not have his strike rate dragged down by deliveries he was never offered.
What is a good strike rate in T20 cricket?
There is no single figure, because the same rate means different things in different overs and on different grounds. The useful comparison is against what the rest of the match produced in the same phase on the same surface, since a rate that looks modest at the death may be excellent on a slow pitch where nobody else scored quickly either. Judge a strike rate against the match par for that phase, never against a number remembered from another competition.
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