Relative Runs© (as well as the associated stats explained below) offers a novel way to explore value in cricket. It seeks to capture a complicated issue simply. Namely, the Relative stats aim to provide neat, numerical vehicles through which to express players’ relative contributions to matches, be they batters or bowlers.
Whereas classic cricket stats (e.g. runs, wickets, strike rate & economy) are absolute in nature, my Relative stats offer a way to capture the contribution of players relative to their peers in an innings.
This is something we do instinctively when we talk about cricket matches. We frame the performances of players within the story of the match to give them added depth and nuance, and to convey truer value. Relative Runs, and my other stats, provide a transparent, numerical route to this same end: stats capturing more than the scorecard.
So how does it all work?
Relative Runs are a pretty simple concept. Instead of runs being expressed as a raw score, they are expressed relative to a par score in the innings concerned. You take the total of an innings, minus extras, divide that by the number of batters that faced a ball in the innings and then you have the ‘Par’ score. The Relative Runs (ЯR) are equal to a batter’s runs (their actual score) minus the Par:
ЯR = runs-Par, where Par = (total-extras)/batters used
Let’s take an example. Say in a T20 innings, a team scores 220, where 20 runs were extras, and eight batters appeared at the crease in the innings. The Par score for that innings would be: (220-20)/8 = 25.
This is to say, the average contribution of a batter was 25 runs. Let’s say one opener got a duck; his Relative Runs will be -25. The first drop, however, scored an impressive century. Imagine he scored 120; his ЯR is (+)95. To put this another way, the opener was 25 runs ‘under Par’, while the first drop was 95 runs ‘over Par’.
ЯR thus gives us a very neat way of expressing the over- or under-performance of the batters. At its core, this is the job ЯR is doing: we are quantifying over- and under-performance in the game.
The logical consequence of ЯR is other stats that follow the same notions. A similar thing can be done for strike rate. Create a par strike rate ((total-extras/balls faced)*100), minus that from a player’s strike rate, and then you have their Relative Strike Rate (ЯSR). The same logic applies to bowlers’ economy rates, too. Take the innings run rate, minus it from a bowler’s economy, and you have their Relative Economy (ЯE).
You might be wondering why I’ve chosen to derive ЯR (and the other stats) from just a single innings and not both or all innings across a match. This is simply because innings across a match can be very different. Batting groups are facing different bowling attacks, at different times, on different states of pitch. The truest demonstration of relative contribution, I believe, is compared with teammates within the same innings, and not across innings, but it’s debatable.
What about wickets? Well, you could do the same thing to determine the relative amount of wickets a bowler takes in an innings. However, there is one key difference between wickets and runs-associated stats in cricket. Whereas any amount of runs can theoretically be scored in an innings, only 10 wickets can ever be taken by a bowling side in an innings.
Because of that absolute maximum, the relative contribution of a bowler in terms of wickets is information we can glean just from glancing at a bowling analysis. If a bowler has taken three wickets, they have 30 per cent of the total possible wickets. If there were only three wickets taken in the innings, they have 100 per cent of them. This is much less nuanced than runs-related stats and virtually self-evident, but still the stat exists: Relative Wickets (ЯW).
Why are these important or interesting?
Well, it might not be interesting to everyone, but there is a persistent problem with the absolute nature of cricket stats. With the huge variance in conditions and scores in cricket, there is no built-in way to measure, for example, one century against another.
Two tons, scored in vastly different conditions, against different bowling attacks, in two very different totals, are trivially very different in terms of their value to the team. To score 100 when your team scores 600/4 is vastly different to scoring 100 when you’re bowled out for 200.
Of course, there is no substitute for the entire story of an innings, or match. Relative Runs (or the other stats) can’t capture the entire narrative or context, but it does give us a nice numerical representation of the idea of a relative contribution.
How much did one batter/bowler contribute to an innings compared to their teammates? My Relative stats have answers to that question. It’s not an exhaustive answer, but an answer that standard cricket stats cannot provide at face value.
Want to know a bit more about how Relative Runs can be applied to analyse performance? Well, then take a look at this article in which I used ЯR to review the 2023 Ashes series in England as well as India’s Test tour of the West Indies in that same year. Or better yet, just go to the homepage and take a look at my latest blog posts!
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