Who is the Greatest T20I batter ever?

Hey everyone. Just like my post on the best t20 bowler ever this will be done using custom metrics “True Average” and “True SR”. I did do another post on this but I deleted it as I changed the methodology a bit.

This will be the batters that have scored over 1000 run against Afg, Aus, Ban, Eng, Ind, NZ, Pak , SA, SL and WI.

Methodology

Each over in a t20 match has its own unique Avg and SR.

Over No Mean_Batting_Average Mean_Strike_Rate 1 25.12 93.21 2 25.19 111.49 3 25.93 124.75 4 27.40 130.49 5 26.95 131.89 6 28.12 130.12 7 28.94 108.06 8 27.69 111.93 9 27.17 114.75 10 28.10 119.98 11 24.17 121.52 12 27.10 124.19 13 24.23 126.82 14 23.74 127.66 15 22.37 132.46 16 21.25 136.77 17 20.80 145.02 18 17.91 145.88 19 15.36 152.00 20 12.20 166.49

Avg matters the most during the death overs and the SR matters most during the middle overs.

This is ideally what I want to track.

I’ll be using an example as it’s easier than writing it down for me.

Let’s use Phil Salt as an example. His base stats vs the other 9 teams are 638 runs @ avg of 35.44 and a sr of 165.71.

Let’s see a break down of his runs and balls faced by each over.

Over No I R B Outs Avg SR 1 15 70 45 2 35 155.56 2 14 69 46 0 69 150 3 12 29 31 2 14.5 93.55 4 12 57 31 2 28.5 183.87 5 8 61 27 1 61 225.93 6 7 59 27 0 59 218.52 7 9 33 24 3 11 137.5 8 7 36 22 1 36 163.64 9 6 22 18 0 22 122.22 10 6 19 14 2 9.5 135.71 11 4 25 11 0 25 227.27 12 3 10 8 1 10 125 13 3 10 8 0 10 125 14 5 14 16 0 14 87.5 15 5 22 15 0 22 146.67 16 4 24 10 1 24 240 17 3 34 11 0 34 309.09 18 3 22 9 0 22 244.44 19 3 10 8 1 10 125 20 2 12 4 2 6 300

Now I’ll subtract his average and SR from the mean average and SR for each specific over.

Over No Avg Diff SR diff 1 9.88 62.35 2 43.81 38.51 3 -11.43 -31.20 4 1.10 53.38 5 34.05 94.04 6 30.88 88.40 7 -17.94 29.44 8 8.31 51.71 9 -5.17 7.47 10 -18.60 15.73 11 0.83 105.75 12 -17.10 0.81 13 -14.23 -1.82 14 -9.74 -40.16 15 -0.37 14.21 16 2.75 103.23 17 13.20 164.07 18 4.09 98.56 19 -5.36 -27.00 20 -6.20 133.51

Now I need to find the mean avg differential and SR differential to see how ahead or behind he is compared to every other batter that would have the same distribution. However since he faces different number of balls for each different over, it needs to be weighted. The weighted averages are the True Average and The True SR.

Player True Ave True SR PD Salt 7.87 44.56

So he’s got a pretty good true average meaning that he does score more runs than the average batter that has the same distribution as him. But that SR is insane. Which makes sense as he bashes bowlers throughout the innings.

I’ll be doing this for the other batters.

Here’s the link. Sky is the freakiest batter ever. He has the 4th highest true average and the highest true SR (until Salt reaches a 1000 runs and assuming he maintains the same rate).

Virat, Rizwan, Babar and Dhoni all have great True Averages. Although Dhoni has a very poor True SR. He usually doesn’t get out but he also does it at a cost of a lot of runs.

Ewin Lewis is a surprise on here. But once you look at his numbers it makes a lot of sense. He SR largely came in the 0-16 range and he only batted once in the death overs. So he was arguably one of the greatest openers we have seen in t20is. Jos Butler also is an elite opener in this format. He has a very high true average and a very respectable true SR.

Munro and Maxi also rate quite highly as well. No one is really surprised by that.

Now onto low SR’s. There’s quite a few Bangladesh and SL batters here which isn’t too surprising as historically they’ve played on some tricky surfaces. We also see some older Pakistan batters who were more of the anchor mould.