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.
Recording balls faced is a relatively recent development 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 made up of part iPad scoring and part scorebook results, which can leave you with different levels of detail recorded. So how do you deal with strike rates when you don't have all of the information about balls faced across all of the innings in question?
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 makes sense when you have that detail for all of the innings in question. If you apply simple maths and add up every run in a season and divide it by the balls faced that were recorded, and balls faced was only recorded for some of those innings, it breaks down.
Take a season of 500 runs across 10 innings, where only 3 of those innings carry a balls faced count, totalling 150 balls. Divide 500 by 150 and the strike rate reads 333. The runs from the other seven un-counted innings cause an obvious problem. Those figures are an illustration of the arithmetic rather than a real player strike rate.
If BetterCricket detects that not all of the innings in the range you are viewing have balls faced recorded, it highlights the issue with "Data may be incomplete". Click the (i) beside it and you get a longer, more detailed explanation.
Where a club has no scorecards at all for a season and only a season total, the figure still stands, but BetterCricket will note that it is based on season totals only. If a club's history was imported as annual figures alone, that is fine, and BetterCricket keeps track of it.
A strike rate from three innings and a strike rate from thirty innings are both valid stats, but you may view them differently. Ranking those two against each other on a leaderboard may not be a fair comparison.
So under Club Settings, BetterCricket lets a club admin set their club's own minimum number of qualifying innings before a strike rate is published on a leaderboard. There is no minimum by default. A viewer can also raise the bar in their own reporting criteria.
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 a valuable statistical record.
Generally speaking, bowling stats are usually in better shape than batting stats. A scorer almost always records the overs bowled, so most clubs will find their economy rates fully covered. Where a spell was recorded without an overs figure, it is left out of the economy rate calculation 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 actually recorded, we will use. Anything that needs an assumption, such as what a player's strike rate might have been, we will not.
BetterCricket only calculates a strike rate and economy rate if the innings recorded provides the data, and will tell you if the information is missing. Search for your club at betterat.cricket/trial to discover your club's records. 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 the runs and the balls have to be counted from the same innings, so the figure is worked out from the innings where both were recorded 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.