Hardik Pandya's IPL Record: Mumbai, Gujarat and Back Again
Hardik PandyaIndia10 min read
Hardik Pandya arrived at the Indian Premier League as a Baroda allrounder nobody outside domestic cricket had heard of, and he has spent the twelve seasons since being either the most useful or the most contested player in whichever dressing room he occupied. Both, usually. His franchise record contains a title won as captain in a team's first season, a season in which he was booed at his own home ground, and a batting aggregate that looks ordinary until you notice how few balls he has faced to reach it.
A base-price signing who paid off inside a month
Mumbai Indians picked him up in the 2015 auction at close to his base price. He was twenty-one, had played two Ranji seasons, and was selected principally because the squad needed a seam-bowling option who could hit. That first campaign gave him eight innings and 112 runs, which sounds negligible until you look at the balls faced: 62. More than half his season's runs came in a single innings of 61 against Kolkata Knight Riders, and he struck at 180.6 across the whole year.
He was in India's Twenty20 side within eight months. The IPL had done what it was designed to do, which was to find a player the domestic circuit had not yet promoted. Baroda had used him as a middle-order batter who bowled a bit; Mumbai turned that around within a season, and the reordering stuck for the rest of his career.
The details of that first year are worth pausing on because they establish a pattern that never really changed. Eight innings, three of them not out, sixty-two balls faced. He was being used in a window of four or five overs at the end of an innings, and he was expected to convert that window into thirty or forty runs. When it worked the numbers looked extraordinary. When it did not, there was no volume of batting to fall back on.
Then 2016 happened, and it is worth putting on the record because it complicates the story. Pandya batted nine times that season for 44 runs, at a strike rate of 69.8, and did not hit a single six. A finisher who cannot clear the rope is not a finisher. He kept his place because Mumbai Indians valued the four overs, which is the whole argument about allrounders compressed into one season.
The Mumbai finisher, 2017 to 2021
The role settled in 2017 and it was a narrow one. Pandya batted sixteen times, was not out nine of them, and made 250 runs from 160 balls with twenty sixes and eleven fours. That ratio is unusual and it tells you exactly where he came in: the seventeenth over, with a set batter at the other end, against a bowler already committed to a plan. Mumbai won the title that year, beating Rising Pune Supergiant by a single run, with his brother Krunal Pandya named player of the match in the final.
His best season with the bat came in 2019: 402 runs from 210 balls, an average of 44.7 and a strike rate of 191.4, with 29 sixes. No batter in the league scored faster over a comparable volume that year. Mumbai won the trophy again, and Pandya's role had quietly expanded from a man who took the last three overs to a man who could take the last seven.
Then the body intervened. Back surgery in late 2019 meant that from 2020 he was, for a period, a batter who did not bowl. The 2021 season was the low point of his Mumbai career: eleven innings, 127 runs, an average of 14.1 and a strike rate of 113.4, with five sixes all season. A specialist middle-order batter with those numbers is not selectable. Mumbai missed the playoffs. At the mega auction that winter, they let him go.
Hardik Pandya's IPL record, season by season
| Season | Team | Inns | Runs | Avg | SR | HS | 50s | 6s |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | Mumbai Indians | 8 | 112 | 22.4 | 180.6 | 61 | 1 | 8 |
| 2016 | Mumbai Indians | 9 | 44 | 6.3 | 69.8 | 9 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | Mumbai Indians | 16 | 250 | 35.7 | 156.3 | 35 | 0 | 20 |
| 2018 | Mumbai Indians | 13 | 260 | 28.9 | 133.3 | 50 | 1 | 11 |
| 2019 | Mumbai Indians | 15 | 402 | 44.7 | 191.4 | 91 | 1 | 29 |
| 2020 | Mumbai Indians | 13 | 281 | 35.1 | 179.0 | 60 | 1 | 25 |
| 2021 | Mumbai Indians | 11 | 127 | 14.1 | 113.4 | 40 | 0 | 5 |
| 2022 | Gujarat Titans | 15 | 487 | 44.3 | 131.3 | 87 | 4 | 12 |
| 2023 | Gujarat Titans | 15 | 346 | 31.5 | 136.8 | 66 | 2 | 15 |
| 2024 | Mumbai Indians | 13 | 216 | 18.0 | 143.0 | 46 | 0 | 11 |
| 2025 | Mumbai Indians | 12 | 224 | 24.9 | 163.5 | 48 | 0 | 12 |
| 2026 | Mumbai Indians | 10 | 206 | 22.9 | 138.3 | 40 | 0 | 7 |
| Total | 150 | 2955 | 27.88 | 146.29 | 91 | 10 | 155 |
He has been not out 44 times in those 150 innings, which is close to a third, and has hit 228 fours against 155 sixes.
Captaining a new franchise to the title at the first attempt
Gujarat Titans took him in the 2022 draft and made him captain of a team that had never played a match. It was an odd appointment on paper. Pandya had never led a professional side, had not bowled competitively for the best part of two years, and was coming off the worst season of his career.
What followed was the most complete campaign he has had. In the 2022 season he made 487 runs at an average of 44.3, and the interesting figure is the strike rate: 131.3, the second lowest of his career, with 49 fours and only twelve sixes. He had stopped being a finisher and become a No. 4 who batted through. Gujarat won ten of their fourteen league games, topped the table, and beat Rajasthan Royals in the final at Ahmedabad in front of 101,566 people. Pandya took three for 17 and made 34, and was named player of the match. The runner-up captain that night was leading a side built around Jos Buttler, who had scored 863 runs in the season and still finished second.
The bowling return mattered as much as the trophy. He had come back to a full four-over spell in a competitive tournament, and he had done it while carrying a batting order.
A second final, and a reserve day in Ahmedabad
The 2023 season was nearly as good and finished worse. Pandya made 346 runs at 31.5 and Gujarat reached the final again, this time with Shubman Gill scoring 890 runs and Mohammed Shami taking 28 wickets. In the final, washed out on 28 May and completed on the reserve day, Gujarat made 214 for 4, the highest total ever posted in an IPL final. Chennai Super Kings chased a revised 171 from fifteen overs and won off the last ball, at 1.35 in the morning.
Two finals in two years, one title, from a franchise assembled from other clubs' surplus. The captaincy record is the strongest single argument in Pandya's favour as a cricketer, and it is one that rarely features in the arguments about him.
It is also worth being clear about what he inherited. Gujarat's squad was built at a draft and an auction in which the established franchises had first claim on the best Indian players. The side that won in 2022 had Rashid Khan and a young Gill, and after that a collection of players other clubs had released. What Pandya added, beyond his own runs and overs, was a settled batting order and a bowling plan that used spin through the middle overs on pitches at the Narendra Modi Stadium that did not obviously suit it.
The trade back to Mumbai, and the season that followed
In November 2023 he was traded back to Mumbai Indians and installed as captain in place of Rohit Sharma, who had led the franchise to five titles. The reaction was severe and sustained. Pandya was booed at grounds across the country, including at the Wankhede, and Mumbai lost their first four matches of 2024 and finished bottom of the table. His own season was the second-worst of his career: 216 runs at an average of 18.0.
It is difficult to separate the cricket from the noise in that year, and probably wrong to try. A side that loses its first four games has problems no captain fixes in May. What can be said is that the two seasons since have been quieter and better. In 2025 he made 224 runs at a strike rate of 163.5 for a Mumbai team that recovered from a poor start to reach the Eliminator, in a season where Suryakumar Yadav was named most valuable player. In 2026 he batted ten times for 206 runs. Neither year produced a fifty. Neither year produced a crisis either.
What the bowling record actually shows
Pandya has taken 82 IPL wickets at an average of 33.56 and an economy rate of 9.35. Those are not good numbers in isolation, and they are not meant to be read in isolation. He bowls in the powerplay and at the death, which are the two phases where economy rates go to die, and he does it as a fourth or fifth option rather than a frontline seamer.
The value is structural. A side with Pandya in it can play an extra batter or an extra specialist bowler, depending on which it needs, and still get twenty overs from four men plus his four. Every team he has played for has built its balance on that assumption, which is also why the seasons when he could not bowl were so damaging: the same player, minus four overs, is a completely different asset.
The auction economics of a player like this
Franchises pay for allrounders on the assumption of availability, which is a bet rather than a purchase. Pandya has been at the centre of three separate valuations of that bet: a base-price signing in 2015, a marquee draft pick and captain in 2022, and a trade back to his original club at a reported record fee in 2023.
Each of those decisions was defensible on its own terms and each was made with incomplete information about his bowling. That is the recurring difficulty with pricing a seam-bowling allrounder. A batter's output is largely predictable from previous seasons; a fast bowler's fitness is not, and a player who is both carries the uncertainty of both. Teams have paid accordingly, and the returns have swung between a title and a wooden spoon within two years.
The wider point applies beyond one player. Since 2022 the league has had two expansion franchises and two mega auctions, and in both the highest bids went to Indian players who filled more than one role. That premium exists precisely because the alternative is picking eleven specialists and finding, in the second week of a season, that the eleventh has nothing to do.
Ten fifties, no hundred, and what the aggregate hides
Across 150 innings Pandya has made ten fifties and no hundred, with a highest score of 91. For a batter with nearly 3,000 runs that is a striking absence, and it is a function of position rather than ability. A man who bats at six or seven in most of his innings is rarely at the crease long enough to reach three figures. Even at Gujarat, where he batted at four, he made four fifties in a season and converted none.
The career average of 27.88 undersells him for the same reason. Strip out the innings in which he arrived with three overs left and the picture changes; so does the not-out rate of nearly one innings in three. The strike rate of 146.29 across 2,020 balls is the number that best describes what he does with a bat.
For his full career figures across formats, see the Hardik Pandya profile. His franchise record is now long enough to be judged as a whole, and what it shows is a player whose value moves with his fitness more sharply than almost anyone else in the competition. When he bowls, his team is a different team. When he does not, he is a middle-order batter with a good strike rate and a modest average, and the arguments start again.