Sai Sudharsan Has the Highest Average in IPL History

Across 57 innings in the Indian Premier League, B Sai Sudharsan has scored 2,515 runs at an average of 48.37. That is the highest career average in the competition's history among batters with a substantial record, and the best batting average list has him at the top of it.

The context makes it stranger. Sudharsan compiled that average between 2022 and 2026, the fastest-scoring period the league has had — a stretch in which the 2026 season alone produced around 27,450 runs across 147 innings, roughly half again as much scoring as the competition managed from a comparable number of innings a decade earlier. Everyone was accelerating. He averaged 48 by doing something else.

What the something else is

Sudharsan's career strike rate is 149.17, which is thirteenth on the best batting strike rate list and not remotely slow. The distinguishing figure is the composition: 258 fours against 83 sixes, with 60.8 per cent of his runs coming in boundaries — the lowest boundary percentage of any batter near the top of that table.

Compare that with the players around him. Andre Russell takes 78.5 per cent of his runs in boundaries and Nicholas Pooran nearly 71. Sudharsan takes 60, which means roughly two runs in five come from running, placement and rotation of strike. He hits a four every six or seven balls, which the most fours list records as among the highest frequencies in the competition, and he hits comparatively few sixes.

That is a game built on timing and gaps rather than on power, and it produces a specific outcome: he gets out much less often than the players scoring at his rate. An average of 48 in T20 cricket is not the product of caution. It is the product of a batter who found a way to score at 149 without taking the dismissal risk that usually accompanies it.

Two seasons of 700-plus

Sudharsan's 2025 season won the Orange Cap: 759 runs in fifteen innings at 54.21, striking at 156.17, with a hundred, six fifties and a top score of 108. He held off Suryakumar Yadav by 42 runs. The Orange Cap winners list puts that among the biggest seasons the award has recognised.

His 2026 season was arguably better and won nothing. He made 722 runs in seventeen innings at a strike rate of 157.99, with 75 fours and thirty sixes — an increase in six-hitting on the previous year — and finished behind Vaibhav Suryavanshi's 776. Suryavanshi struck at 238 that season, which is a figure with no precedent in the competition, and losing an Orange Cap to it is not a criticism of anyone.

Back-to-back seasons above 700 runs, at strike rates near 157, is a two-year run only a handful of batters in the league's history can match. Across five seasons he has three hundreds and twenty fifties from 57 innings, which the most centuries and most fifties tables record as a conversion rate — a fifty-plus score roughly every second and a half innings — better than almost anyone.

The partnership that built Gujarat's top order

Sudharsan has played his entire IPL career for Gujarat Titans, and the reason his numbers look the way they do is partly his opening partnership with Shubman Gill. The pair appear three times on the competition's highest partnerships list, including 210 against Chennai at Ahmedabad in May 2024 and an unbroken 205 against Delhi in May 2025.

Three stands of 200-plus by the same pair is unusual, and it reflects a division of labour that suits Sudharsan precisely. Gill takes on the bowling early; Sudharsan works the ball around, keeps the rate above 140 without risk, and is still there in the fifteenth over. He has 1,021 powerplay runs at a strike rate of 138.5 and 1,186 in the middle overs at 148.3 — a batter who accelerates as the innings goes on rather than front-loading, which is why so few of his innings end early.

Test cricket, and a harder problem

Sudharsan made his Test debut at Headingley on 20 June 2025, batting at number three, in the position India had struggled to fill since Cheteshwar Pujara — who handed him his cap. He was caught down the leg side off Ben Stokes for nought before lunch on the first day, and was left out of the following match.

The recovery has been steadier than that start suggested. He was recalled, has since been backed publicly as India's Test number three, and by mid-2026 had a Test record of seven matches for 383 runs at 31.92, including 81 from 104 balls against Afghanistan at New Chandigarh in June 2026.

An average of 32 after seven Tests at number three is neither a success nor a failure; it is an unfinished apprenticeship. What is more informative is that the selectors backed a twenty-three-year-old in the hardest position in the batting order and kept backing him through a duck on debut, which suggests they were selecting on method rather than on returns. His two seasons with Surrey in county cricket in 2023 and 2024 were part of the same reasoning: a left-hander with a compact technique who had already batted in English conditions.

Why the low six count is a feature, not a gap

The obvious criticism of Sudharsan is that 83 sixes in 57 innings is not enough for a top-order batter in the current game, and that a career average of 48 is partly a symptom of not taking on enough risk. It is worth answering that directly, because the arithmetic does not support it.

A four hit every six or seven balls, sustained across an innings, produces a scoring rate in the high 140s on its own. Sixes are worth fifty per cent more per ball than fours, but they are hit at a materially lower success rate, and the difference between a batter who hits a six every eight balls and one who hits a four every six and a half is much smaller in runs per over than it looks in highlights. Where the two diverge sharply is in dismissals, and that is entirely in Sudharsan's favour.

The strategic value follows. A side whose number three is going at 150 without getting out is not just scoring; it is preserving wickets for the batters who do take extreme risk at the death. Gujarat's structure through these seasons has been legible on exactly that basis: two top-order batters who do not fail often, then finishers instructed to swing from the moment they arrive. Sudharsan's average is what makes the second half of that plan affordable.

The 2026 increase in six-hitting, from a rate in the low twenties per season to thirty in seventeen innings, is the detail to watch. A batter adding power to an already efficient method is the version of him that becomes genuinely difficult to bowl at. A batter who trades the efficiency for the power ends up as one of thirty similar players.

What has not been tested

Two caveats belong in any honest account of a five-season record.

The first is that Sudharsan has played his entire franchise career for one well-run side, at one venue, in one role, alongside one of the best openers of his generation. Averages of 48 do not arrive in isolation, and the batter who has to open with somebody worse, at a ground where the ball does not come off the surface as cleanly, is a different proposition. He has not yet had to be that batter.

The second is the international white-ball record, which is thin. He has been picked in India's limited-overs squads without establishing a settled place, and India's white-ball top order is the deepest in the world. A player whose IPL numbers are the best in the competition's history and who is not automatic in his country's ODI side is a fact about Indian cricket rather than about him, and the same fact has shaped the careers of Ruturaj Gaikwad and others.

The claim worth making

Sudharsan is twenty-four and it is far too early to say what he will be. What can be said now is that his record already falsifies something the format spent fifteen years believing: that a high T20 average necessarily means a low strike rate, and that scoring quickly necessarily means getting out often.

He scores at 149 and averages 48. Both figures are near the top of their respective lists, which had not previously happened, and the mechanism is visible in the boundary split — fewer sixes, far more fours, a great deal of running. If that combination holds across another five seasons and different conditions, it is the most interesting technical development in T20 batting since the six-hitting era began. If it does not, it will have been an exceptional start in favourable circumstances. Career figures are on the B Sai Sudharsan profile.