Plenty of clubs only started counting balls faced recently, and a single season can be part iPad and part written book. Here is why that used to print a strike rate of 333, and how BetterCricket works one out now.
Balls faced is a recent habit in club cricket. It was never part of the traditional scorecard line, and plenty of competitions only began asking for it per batter in the last decade or two. Even now a single season can be part iPad and part written book, which leaves every run recorded and a ball count against only some of the innings. So what do you do with a strike rate when you hold all of one half and some of the other?
A batting average needs runs scored and times dismissed. Both are on every scorecard a club has ever kept, so averages hold good as far back as the records go.
A strike rate is different. It is runs divided by balls faced, and a ratio only means something when its top and bottom describe the same innings. Add up every run in a season and divide by every ball on file and you break that rule without noticing.
Take a season of 500 runs across 10 innings, where only 3 of those innings carry a ball count, totalling 150 balls. Divide 500 by 150 and the strike rate reads 333. The runs from the seven un-counted innings land on top of the sum with nothing underneath them to answer for. Those figures are an illustration of the arithmetic rather than a real player, but the shape of the error is what clubs were seeing.
The rate is worked out from the innings that recorded both halves. In that example it reads 100, which is what those three innings actually say, rather than 333, which is what nothing says.
The figure then tells you what answered it. Where a rate covers less than the whole of what it describes, the number carries a mark and a line beside it reading "Data may be incomplete" with the count, as in "from 3 of 10 innings". An (i) beside it opens the longer explanation for anyone who wants it.
Withholding is reserved for what genuinely cannot be worked out. The rules are narrow and worth knowing:
Where a club has no scorecards at all for a season and only a season total, the figure still stands and says it was worked out from season totals. A club whose history arrived as annual figures rather than card by card does not lose its strike rates over a technicality.
A caveat at the bottom of a page does not travel with the number. Figures get screenshotted for the club Facebook page, typed into the yearbook and read out at presentation night, and a note left behind on the website is no use to any of that. So the mark rides on the figure itself, in the table, next to the digits.
It is a dagger rather than an asterisk. An asterisk already means not out on every cricket scorecard in the world, and a batting table is the last place to give it a second job.
Nothing is drawn at all where the rate covers everything. A note on every figure in the app is noise that teaches people to stop reading notes, and then the one that matters gets skipped with the rest.
A strike rate from three innings and one from thirty are both real figures, and they are not the same kind of figure. Ranking them against each other on one board is the thing worth guarding against.
So a club can set its own minimum before a rate is published on a leaderboard, under Club Settings. It is counted on the innings that answered the rate, not the innings played, so ten played and three counted cannot clear a ten-innings bar. There is no minimum by default, because switching one on for every club would drop players off their own leaderboard without anybody choosing it. A viewer can also raise the bar for one look using the pills above the board.
In the record book, best strike rate and best economy are kept season by season rather than all time. Coverage varies too much across a long career for an all-time list to compare like with like, and a record that cannot be compared fairly is not much of a record.
Only the rates read the covered innings. Everything below counts every innings, for as far back as a club's records go.
Bowling is usually in better shape than batting anyway. A scorer who writes nothing else still writes the overs, so most clubs will find their economy fully covered and no note drawn. Where a spell did reach us without an overs figure, it is left out of the rate rather than having its runs counted against somebody else's overs.
There is a line here, and it runs between recovering a figure and inventing one. Anything reachable by arithmetic on a number somebody wrote down at the time, we will use. Anything that needs an assumption about how a player batted, we will not.
| Suggested workaround | Why we do not do it |
|---|---|
| Estimate balls faced from time at the crease | Minutes and balls are related but not convertible. Two batters can face very different numbers of balls in the same forty minutes, depending on who was at the other end and whether spin or pace was on. |
| Divide up the team's total overs | The team's balls are known. How they were shared between eleven batters is the entire question, and it is the part the scorebook does not answer. |
| Apply a typical strike rate for the era or the grade | The figure would describe the era, not the player. A record book exists to say what this bloke did. |
| Carry the recorded innings back across the rest | That assumes he batted at 22 the way he batted at 41. If that held, the ball counts would not be needed in the first place. |
More covered innings means a rate that speaks for more of a career. Two routes work, and both are recovery rather than estimation.
Hand over either and the coverage on the affected seasons rises, the note recedes, and the figure starts speaking for more of the player.
BetterCricket works every strike rate and economy out from the innings that can answer it, and says on the figure itself where that is less than the whole story. Search for your club at betterat.cricket/trial to see what your own records hold. Learn more
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Because some of the innings behind it did not record a ball count. A strike rate is runs divided by balls faced, and both halves have to come from the same innings, so the figure is worked out from the innings that recorded both and the note tells you how many that was. Runs, average and every other figure on the page still count every innings.
Because the runs from innings with no ball count land on top of the sum with nothing underneath them, which sends the answer far too high. A season of 500 runs across 10 innings with only 150 balls recorded across 3 of them reads 333 that way, where those three innings actually say 100.
Rarely. Overs have always been part of the standard figures line, so a scorer who writes nothing else still writes the overs and most clubs find their economy fully covered with no note drawn. Where a spell did arrive without an overs figure, it is left out of the rate rather than having its runs counted against another bowler's overs.
Yes, wherever the ball counts exist somewhere. Old annual reports and yearbooks that printed a per-player season strike rate are the quickest route, since balls faced can be recovered from them exactly. Scorebooks with a balls faced column that was filled in but never typed up are the other, and BetterCricket's scorecard reader can take those from a photograph or scan. Neither is an estimate, so both are treated as real data.