Balls per boundary tells me more about a batter than his strike rate

One number hides how the runs arrived; the other exposes whether a player can actually clear the ring under pressure.

Strike rate is an average of an average, which is the sort of sentence that gets you thrown out of a commentary box, but it is true. A hundred and forty means the same thing whether it came from fourteen boundaries in fifty balls with thirty-six dots, or from steady placement and hard running with two fours. Those are different cricketers. They fail in different conditions and against different bowlers, and the number that is supposed to describe them cannot tell them apart.

Balls per boundary can. It answers one question, plainly: how often does this player clear or beat the field? A batter at four is producing something every four deliveries, which means the bowler has a problem every four deliveries and cannot settle. A batter at nine is scoring at the same rate through singles, which is fine on a good pitch with a partner going hard at the other end and completely useless when eleven are needed off the last over.

The pairing is where it gets useful. Take balls per boundary and dot percentage together and you have described almost the whole innings shape. High boundary frequency with high dots is the classic risk profile, brilliant twice a month and infuriating the rest of the time. Low boundary frequency with low dots is the accumulator, a player who keeps the scoreboard alive and cannot finish. Both can average forty. They are not interchangeable and no selection meeting should treat them as such.

The objection is that boundary frequency is heavily a function of ground size and pitch, and it is. A player at a small ground with a fast outfield looks a different cricketer from the same man at a big square in April. Fine. Normalise for venue, which every analytics department already does for expected runs anyway, and the ranking survives.

What I actually want is for broadcasters to stop putting a career strike rate on screen when a batter walks in. It tells you almost nothing about the next twenty minutes.

Show me his boundary frequency in this phase, at this ground, against this type of bowling. That number is smaller, harder to compute, and would occasionally embarrass a selector. Which is roughly the point of statistics.