Base/Out Musings

Thinking about the way sabermetrics analyses baseball, and trying to translate that to cricket, is the main area where not enough work has been done. There's a tendency, even on my part, to focus on trying to keep too close to the baseball model, and not enough on adapting the underlying principles to the very different game of cricket. The first big breakthrough I made was in recognizing that cricket is a mirror image, so some things need to be reversed. Thus, wickets in cricket are more analytically useful than runs, whereas in baseball runs are of more use than outs.

Looking at the idea of the base/out state in an inning has brought me to the realization that in order to estimate win expectancy, a cricket sabermetrics would do better to look to Duckworth-Lewis, and think about resources in a Test match. This opens up some fascinating potential in the analysis of bowling, but also some interesting perspectives on batting. I'm working on a way to deploy this so that we can follow a Test match via this blog and see if practice leads to understanding.