Extra runs

This week's question comes from Mr Andrew Ragg, from Canberra, Australia. Perhaps due to his own infamous reputation as a bowler of wides, he asks:

What is the greatest percentage of runs a team has scored from extras?

To start with, let me point out that doing percentages of runs in indoor cricket can be tricky - and sometimes meaningless - when negative scores (or small positive scores) come in to play. For example, if we just jump straight in with a spreadsheet of stats, and look at the highest and lowest percentages, we get these two winners:

Batting Team	Bowling Team	Total Score	Runs from extras	Percentage
Squid Tubes	Popped Collars	1	26	2600.0%
Pidge's Coupe	Popped Collars	-4	30	-750.0%

The winners will always be teams with a total score close to zero (positive or negative). And if you set some minimum score, you just end up with the teams whose totals are close to that score.

So instead, we're going to use what I'm going to call "runs accumulated". That is the number of runs a team made during their innings, without counting negative runs for wickets lost and penalties given.

And from here it's all quick and straight forward. Here's the innings with the highest percentage of runs from extras:

Date	Batting Team	Bowling Team	Runs Accumulated	Runs from extras	Percentage
27/9/10	Pidge's Coup	Popped Collars	182	70	38.5%
14/2/11	Mal Practice	Popped Collars	174	50	28.7%
25/10/10	GFS	Popped Collars	176	50	28.4%
16/5/11	Popped Collars	Take That	226	62	27.4%
1/2/10	Big 4 Bandits	Popped Collars	200	54	27.0%

And here's the lowest:

Date	Batting Team	Bowling Team	Runs Accumulated	Runs from extras	Percentage
30/11/09	Popped Collars	66s	238	10	4.2%
22/8/11	Popped Collars	Squid Tubes	220	10	4.5%
18/7/11	Popped Collars	Take That	289	14	4.8%
13/12/10	Popped Collars	SNAFU	320	16	5.0%
8/8/11	Popped Collars	SNAFU	270	14	5.2%

Note the stand-out innings at the top of the first table... a whopping 10% higher than anything else. Likely an untouchable record!

Unsurprisingly, the high percentages come in games where the bowling team (mostly Popped Collars!) send down a lot of wide deliveries (that's what most extras are due to), and where the batting team make an average or below average number of runs.

Interestingly, the innings with the most extras is actually waaay down at about 50th position in the percentage list. That innings was one that we batted, and our opponents sent down 34 extras - 2 of them on double score balls - for 72 free runs. But that innings is also the record holder for most runs accumulated,and highest total. By a long way in both categories!
On that day, we accumulated 374 runs (next highest is 320), and only got out 9 times for a total of 329 (next best 260). The percentage of runs via extras is only 19.3%

In the low percentages table, it's all us batting. We clearly score more runs, and bowl more wides than our opponents. Only bowling 5 extras in an innings is pretty impressive. Not something we've ever done...