Everybody knows Jasprit Bumrah is going to go down as an all-time great. And not just in one format of the game, but all three. He’s an automatic pick in world XIs for Tests, ODIs and T20s. Recently, at the just gone T20 World Cup, he only underlined his 20-over prowess, claiming the most wickets in the tournament (14) at an average of 12.42 and a frankly astonishing economy rate of 6.21.
Those numbers in and of themselves tell a story of someone being incredibly effective in both an offensive and defensive sense, simultaneously. And therein lies the key to Bumrah’s greatness: he’s the best of both worlds in one bowler.
Now, I don’t intend to argue with that fact at all in what follows. On the contrary, I want to further explicate just how good Bumrah is by telling a little data story. And do that, I’m going to draw on one of my stats from the Relative Runs universe. Namely, Relative Economy (ЯE). But before we get to Bumrah’s numerical story at the World Cup, let me just explain the stat briefly…
What is Relative Economy?
Where Relative Runs look to quantify the relative value of a batter’s runs, and in so doing, their over- or underperformance in an innings, Relative Economy is about quantifying the relative value of a bowler’s economy rate, in relation to their peers in the innings in which their overs were bowled.
The formulation of Relative Economy is pretty simple: we take a bowler’s economy rate, and subtract from it a ‘par economy’ from that same innings. Just like how, for Relative Runs, we take a batter’s runs and subtract from it the ‘par score’ from the innings.
But what is the par economy? Well, first we need to define that. It’s going to be similar to the innings run rate, just slightly adjusted.
In the same way that for Relative Runs, we adjust the total to determine the par score by subtracting extras (as they are not runs off the bat), we are going to take off some extras from the total to determine par economy, too. But not all the extras. We will keep wides and no-ball penalties in the innings total as those two metrics are counted against a bowler’s name in their analysis, but we will remove all byes and leg byes from the total. Then we divide that new sum by the total overs bowled (in terms of legal deliveries), and we thus have the par economy (ParE).
Relative Economy (ЯE) = Classic economy rate – ParE, where ParE = (total innings runs-byes&leg byes)/overs bowled.
Here’s a quick example to illustrate that formulation in practice…
In the T20 World Cup final, Bumrah bowled four full overs that went for 15 runs (quite incredibly), giving him an economy rate of 3.75. New Zealand scored 159 runs, but five of those were byes (b4, lb1), in exactly 19 overs. That means the ParE was 154/19, or 8.1. The run rate was 8.37, so you can see the slight but important difference here. This means Bumrah’s Relative Economy for the match was -4.35 (3.75-8.1).
An aside on the way byes and leg byes are treated.
The way byes and leg byes are treated in cricket somewhat troubled me when formulating Relative Economy. In some cases, it might make sense to count byes towards a bowler’s economy because they have occurred within their overs. The historical rationale for taking them off the bowler’s count is that they are rather fielding errors. However, in some cases, especially for leg byes, there might be no obvious fielding error involved in a bye. I can return to this in more detail another time. For now, we are saying byes are excluded from Relative Economy counts, but wides and no balls are not. While all extras are taken off Relative Runs counts, as they are not scored by the batter. There’s another debate to have around whether good batters might even force wides, and should thus be ‘awarded’ those runs, if not in a scorecard sense, then in an analytical sense.
So we have our example above, but what does it mean? Well, it means that Bumrah was, on average, 4.35 runs cheaper than his teammates per over in the final. If you consider that the Par Economy was 8.1, that means he cost almost 50 per cent of the average bowler’s economy per over. And not in the game, but just in his team, the winning team, India! That’s a staggering stat, but also illustrative of just how good he was that night.
It wasn’t just that night, though. Let’s go through the entire tournament and see how Bumrah went, relatively, throughout the eight matches he played in…
Against Namibia, his Relative Economy was -1.27. Against Pakistan, it was 2.22. Against the Netherlands, it was -3.04. Against South Africa, it was -5.45. Against Zimbabwe, it was -2.1. Against the West Indies, it was -0.7. Against England in the semi-final, it was -3.9. And in the final, as noted above, it was -4.35.
As you can see, he was below par in every match bar one, against Pakistan. And in most cases, he was well below par economy, too. If we take the average of Bumrah’s Relative Economy across his eight matches at the World Cup, we get -2.32 (-18.59/8).
And this is where the data, via the tool of Relative Economy, tells a great story: on average across the tournament, Jasprit Bumrah costs more than two runs fewer than the average economy of his own teammates per over bowled. Or to put that another way, Bumrah’s teammates (who are also some of the best T20 bowlers in the world, mind) would go for two runs more than him per over, on average, at the World Cup.
Bumrah even better than he seems?
While a tournament economy rate of 6.21 is, in its own right, very telling as a stat, we have no idea how that economy rate fits in relatively to its cricketing ecosystem, so to speak. Was it a high-scoring tournament, and are those out-of-this-world numbers? Or was it quite a low-scoring tournament, and that is just slightly better than par?
Of course, going at around six runs per over is always going to be exceptional in a T20 match, especially at the top level, but that only explains things relative to how we perceive the par stats of the game at large, not in relation to specific matches from which those stats were gleaned, or in relation to contemporaries playining in the same conditions.
This is where the strength of relative stats shines through.
We didn’t have a readymade stat to show that a bowler outperformed (or underperformed) his peers considerably in terms of his expense… but now we do: Relative Economy. And via this tool, we are able to add a layer of nuance to the numerical story of the performance.
In the case of Bumrah at the 2026 World Cup, Relative Economy helps us to add further depth and gloss to just how good this guy was and is. So, how good was he? 2.32 runs per over cheaper than his own teammates, that’s how good! And while his classic stats are impressive enough on their own, this Relative Economy analysis might just go to show that Bumrah was even better than his numbers look at a glance.
Relative Runs 