Strike rates are shared property, not individual ones

A batter's scoring rate is co-produced by whoever stands at the other end, and we keep filing it as a solo number.

Two batters are at the crease in the eleventh over. One takes eleven off the over. The other takes two singles from five balls and looks becalmed. At the innings break both numbers go into separate columns as though they happened in separate matches. They did not. The second man was slow partly because the first was quick, and the first could afford to be quick precisely because the second was not.

This is the thing short format analysis still handles badly. Scoring rate gets treated as a property of an individual, like a bowling action, when it is closer to a negotiation. Somebody has to face the leg spinner's good over. Somebody has to decline the risk while a set partner is going. The player who takes that job carries a career strike rate slightly worse than his ability, permanently, and there is no column that hands it back.

You see the consequence at auctions and in selection meetings. Middle order accumulators get priced as a compromise. Finishers get priced on numbers manufactured in part by whoever ate the difficult overs at the other end. I think this is one of the larger mispricings left in the format, and it survives because correcting it needs ball by ball partnership context that nobody wants to put on a graphic.

There is a related error in how a slow start gets read. A batter on eight from twelve is called a passenger. Sometimes he is. Sometimes he is the only reason the side is not five down, and those twelve balls were the cheapest available route to the phase where his partner could swing. The cost is real. The alternative was not free either.

What I want, if anyone is building it, is a partnership adjusted rate. Simple enough idea. Compare a batter's scoring against what the match state, the bowler and his partner's behaviour would predict, then report the gap rather than the raw figure.

Until something like that exists, a career strike rate is a rough statement about the role a player was handed and only a very rough one about how well he did it. The number is not lying. It is answering a different question from the one you asked.