Sanju Samson's IPL Record and the Rajasthan Royals Captaincy

Sanju Samson's franchise career is a slow burn that most of the Indian Premier League's history happened around. He arrived at Rajasthan Royals in 2013 as an eighteen-year-old wicketkeeper from Kerala, and for a decade he was the league's most argued-about talent: obviously gifted, never quite prolific. Then, in his thirties, the record caught up with the reputation. He passed 5,000 IPL runs, captained Rajasthan for five seasons, and in 2026 made two hundreds in his first campaign for Chennai Super Kings at a strike rate higher than anything he had managed before.

An eighteen-year-old in a dressing room built by Dravid

Rajasthan picked Samson up for the 2013 season after Kochi Tuskers Kerala, the franchise that had originally signed him, folded. The dressing room he walked into was run by Rahul Dravid, who was in his final season as a player and already functioning as the franchise's organising mind. Samson made 206 runs in ten innings that year, batting mostly in the middle order, with a fifty against Royal Challengers that announced him to a wider audience.

The two seasons that followed produced 339 and 204 runs. These are the numbers of a promising teenager, not a star, and it is worth being clear about that because the later story depends on it. Samson at twenty was a batter of obvious touch whose scores kept stopping in the sixties and seventies. The talent was never in dispute. The conversion was.

Two years in Delhi, and a first hundred

When Rajasthan were suspended from the league for two seasons, Samson moved to Delhi. The 2016 season brought 291 runs at a strike rate of 112.4, a holding pattern. The 2017 season was better in every respect: 386 runs at a strike rate of 141.4, and his first IPL hundred, 102 against Rising Pune Supergiant. He was still only twenty-two, and the innings had the shape that would become his signature — a quiet start, then acceleration through extraordinary clean hitting square of the wicket and over long-on.

He went back to Rajasthan when the franchise returned in 2018 and made 441 runs, his best aggregate to that point, with 92 not out against Bengaluru among them. In the 2019 season he added a second hundred, an unbeaten 102 against Sunrisers Hyderabad. The 2020 season in the United Arab Emirates sharpened the profile further: only 375 runs, but struck at 158.9 with twenty-six sixes, many of them in Sharjah, where his bat swing seemed built for the short square boundaries.

The captaincy, and a 119 that set its tone

Rajasthan gave Samson the captaincy before the 2021 season, and his first match in the job remains one of the more remarkable debuts a new captain has produced. Chasing 222 against Punjab Kings, he made 119 from number three and took the game to the final ball before Rajasthan fell four runs short. The innings contained everything the previous eight years had promised, and the season that followed was his most complete yet: 484 runs at 40.3, with a fifty-plus score roughly every third innings.

The captaincy years changed how he batted. From 2021 onward Samson stopped being a middle-order cameo player and became the wicketkeeper-batter around whom Rajasthan's innings was organised, usually at three. His aggregates from 2021 to 2024 read 484, 458, 362 and 531 — not spectacular by Orange Cap standards, but delivered at strike rates between 136 and 154 while he also ran the side and kept wicket.

2022: a final, fourteen years on

The 2022 season was the high point of the captaincy. Rajasthan, champions in the inaugural year under Shane Warne and rarely close since, reached the final. Jos Buttler scored four hundreds and 863 runs; Yuzvendra Chahal took the Purple Cap; Samson contributed 458 runs at a strike rate of 146.8 and marshalled a young side with unusual calm. Gujarat Titans beat them in the final in Ahmedabad, but taking Rajasthan back to the last match of the season was, at the time, the franchise's best result in fourteen years.

The seasons either side were less kind. In 2023 Rajasthan missed the playoffs despite a strong start. In the 2024 season Samson produced his best year with the bat as captain — 531 runs at 48.3, with five fifties — and Rajasthan reached the playoffs again, going out a step short of the final. His keeping and his handling of young batters such as Yashasvi Jaiswal and Riyan Parag were as important as his runs.

Samson's IPL batting record, season by season

The full record, computed from ball-by-ball data.

Season	Team	Inns	Runs	Avg	SR	HS	100s	50s
2013	Rajasthan	10	206	25.8	115.7	63	0	1
2014	Rajasthan	13	339	26.1	124.2	74	0	2
2015	Rajasthan	11	204	20.4	125.2	76	0	1
2016	Delhi	14	291	26.5	112.4	60	0	1
2017	Delhi	14	386	27.6	141.4	102	1	2
2018	Rajasthan	15	441	31.5	137.8	92	0	3
2019	Rajasthan	11	342	34.2	148.7	102	1	0
2020	Rajasthan	14	375	28.8	158.9	85	0	3
2021	Rajasthan	14	484	40.3	136.7	119	1	2
2022	Rajasthan	17	458	28.6	146.8	55	0	2
2023	Rajasthan	14	362	30.2	153.4	66	0	3
2024	Rajasthan	15	531	48.3	153.5	86	0	5
2025	Rajasthan	9	285	31.7	140.4	66	0	1
2026	Chennai	14	477	43.4	165.6	115	2	1
Total		185	5181	31.59	141.13	119	5	27

Across those 185 innings he has hit 432 fours and 243 sixes, and been not out twenty-one times. His 4,027 runs in Rajasthan colours are the most any batter has scored for the franchise.

The trade to Chennai, and a different Samson

The 2025 season was cut short for him at nine innings by injury, and it proved to be his last for Rajasthan. That November the franchise traded him to Chennai Super Kings, ending a twelve-year association across three spells and closing the captaincy era at five seasons. Trades of established captains are rare in this league, and this one reset both sides: Rajasthan rebuilt around their young batting, and Chennai acquired a top-order wicketkeeper entering his thirties with something to prove.

What followed in the 2026 season was the best sustained hitting of his career. Freed of the captaincy, Samson made 477 runs in fourteen innings at 43.4, with a strike rate of 165.6 that dwarfed every previous season, two hundreds — as many as he had managed in the preceding thirteen years combined — and a highest score of 115. He had arrived at Chennai off the back of a Player of the Tournament award at the 2026 T20 World Cup, and the confidence carried straight across.

Where the record now sits

The totals — 5,181 runs at 31.59, striking at 141.13, with five hundreds and twenty-seven fifties — place Samson comfortably among the league's most productive wicketkeeper-batters, and the shape of the curve matters as much as its size. His average and strike rate have both risen through his thirties, which is the reverse of the usual pattern, and 2024 and 2026 are statistically the two best seasons he has played.

The criticism that trailed him for a decade — that the eye-catching thirties never became match-winning nineties — has quietly stopped being true. Since taking the Rajasthan captaincy in 2021 he has passed fifty thirty times in six seasons. What the record still lacks is a title. He captained one losing finalist, and left Rajasthan the year before joining a Chennai side chasing one; whether the move eventually delivers a medal will decide how this career's franchise chapter is remembered.

His path to this point began a long way from any franchise, in Thiruvananthapuram, a story told in the Kerala years and the wicketkeeping craft. The international arc that ran alongside it — three T20I hundreds and a World Cup — is covered in Samson's T20I career piece. Full figures are on the Sanju Samson profile.