Money ball in cricket - Time to revolutionise the game

Rajasthan Royals are one team that have benefited from doing the unconventional

If you haven’t already heard of ‘Moneyball’, it was a book written in 2003 by Michael Lewis on Oakland Athletics general manager’s use of sabermetrics in the 2002 Major League Baseball season, which led the team that had severe budget constraints to the play-off stages. They went on to win 20 games in a row, which is still a record in the modern era. For those who haven’t read the book, there is always Brad Pitt’s big screen adaptation Moneyball, which hit the screens in 2011. A striking feature of the cash rich MLB is the disparity between the teams in terms of spending power. In 2002, the Oakland A’s had spent $41 million as against the New York Yankees’ $120 million for just the player salaries.

Billy Beane along with his deputy Paul DePodesta, a Harvard graduate in economics, set about changing the way statistics was defined in baseball. They relied on a deeply objective and rigorous statistical approach called Sabermetrics (named after the acronym SABR – Society for American Baseball Research) to determine the value of a player. With little to spend, they set about to scout for players undervalued by the traditional statistical system. They overlooked the conventional way to determine the efficiency of players, like batting averages or runs batted in (RBI), and focused on a more detailed approach that evaluates ‘in game activity’. As it turned to be a smashing success, the method has, since then, been widely used by all the other MLB teams.

The earliest recorded cricket games go back to 1600’s, thereby providing a large enough sample space to pull data. It has always been a game that hinged itself on a vast variety of statistical data like strike rates, batting averages, bowling averages, economy and, more recently, dot balls. It may not be feasible yet in international cricket, but it can very well have its applications in local leagues like the Indian Premier League.

What makes the MLB concept applicable here is the very radical concept of players being bought as commodities at the auctions. The striking difference between the cricket and baseball leagues is that while the US league does not have budget limitations, the teams in the IPL are bound to certain restrictions.

While every team would wish to have a Dhoni, Sachin or a Gayle, what’s even more important are the remaining players who are needed to complete the squad. While spending too much on a marquee player is not something to be frowned upon, a better team balance that can enable a team to win matches should be of the highest priority. Rajasthan Royals, a team that nobody gave a chance to and a team that never had the likes of any Indian stalwarts, lifting the cup in 2008 was our own version of underdogs doing the improbable.

In the shortest format of cricket, a game can be turned around on its head in a flash, which calls for cricketers with unique abilities. In cricket, the closest someone has come up to the moneyball theory is Michael Hussey; the Australian batsman believes in the magic of “160” in T20s, which is the sum of batting averages and strike rates. According to him, a player with an average of 60 and a strike rate of 100 is as efficient as a player with an average of 20 and a strike rate of 140.

It’s time for some out-of-the-box thinking; something that brings about the value of a player to the table. The recent introduction of WASP in the just concluded Newzealand series is a prime example of analytics in cricket. If we make use of the abundant data available over the years, a lot of insights can be obtained ranging from the bowler who has the highest chance of taking a wicket against a particular batsman to a player’s vulnerability to choke while batting in the death overs.

Players’ performances can be subdivided based on his numbers during the powerplay overs, middle overs and the slog overs (last 5). Another interesting idea is to make a note of how a batsman goes about scoring runs – percentage of boundaries, sixes, ones, twos and threes – can prove insightful in improvising the batting order according to the situation.

Even the legendary Ricky Ponting had called for a system to monitor the ‘fielding efficiency’ or ‘fielding effectiveness’ of players, something that has for long been ignored. How good would it be to have a technology that determines the number of runs saved by each player in the outfield? It’s not something impossible to implement either. Like the ‘Hawk-Eyes’ and ‘Hot-Spots’, new technologies might catch up sooner than we think.

The ‘ACA MVP awards’ is the closest that the cricketing world has come up with in terms of evaluating the value of a player, although the method is under wraps; it looks at a lot of statistics and parameters in evaluating a players value to a team.

The fact that Sanju Samson, who has contributed immensely to Rajasthan Royals, was bought for a meagre 10 lakhs per season last year shows the value of having a system in place that can identify unproven talents. With the team owners and the management brainstorming over the players to pick in next Thursday’s IPL 2014 auctions, don’t be surprised if a relatively unknown player grabs more than what you thought he was worth for based on conventional wisdom.

You might not have heard of Ben Cutting, a tall all-rounder from Australia, but you might be surprised at how much he might earn in the auctions this year (Base price:50 Lakhs). Indians have always been good at number crunching, and it wont take too long for someone to come up with new age statistics that can lead to famous victories by teams with valuable players over teams that looks good just on paper.