Pinch hitting was never really about hitting

The role worked because it forced a captain to abandon his plan for the innings, and that is still its only justification.

The word makes it sound like a strength contest. It was not. When sides first started sending a bowler up the order to swing in the opening overs, the point was not the runs he might make, it was the decision he forced on the fielding captain within about nine deliveries. Keep the field up and risk being taken for thirty in three overs, or push out early and hand the recognised batters an easy platform. Either answer is a concession, and the concession is the return on the gamble.

That is why the role does not translate cleanly to a modern format where every batter down to eight can hit. If the whole side is dangerous, promoting somebody to be dangerous earlier is a smaller idea. The captain does not have to change anything, he was already defending against power, and your slogger simply gets out cheaply and gives you a hole to fill.

Where it still pays is the specific matchup. A left-hander sent up against a leg-spinner opening the bowling, or a lower-order player promoted purely because the fielding side has a mediocre sixth bowler who has to get through his overs somehow. That is not pinch hitting in the old sense. It is a targeted attack on the weakest thing the opposition owns, and the price of failure is one player who was not going to face many balls anyway.

I would go further, and this is the part people argue with. Batting orders in short formats should be published as a range, not an order, and the eleventh-hour promotion should be routine rather than a talking point. Sides already do this and then apologise for it in the press conference as though the fixed order were a moral obligation handed down at birth.

The reason they apologise is that when it fails it looks stupid, and a coach who looks stupid loses his job faster than a coach who is merely predictable.

So the tactic survives as an occasional flourish rather than a system, which is a shame, because the fear it creates in a captain lasts three overs longer than the batter usually does.