Back at Weston, where the first ball is worth double runs, the decision was more important than now - but how important is it anyway? Here's the stats based on who faces the ball of each pair.
As I seem to often do lately, here's a small unrelated aside to start with. Sanjit's run of bowling without taking a wicket came to an end during last week's game. After Brad put down one chance early, Sanjit passed Julian's 4th, 3rd and 2nd placed performances. His streak ended at 62 balls with a classic "full toss at the top of middle stump" which the batter swung at wildly, and missed. Andy's 72 ball record still stands tall.
Players facing first
The data I extracted for these stats made a spreadsheet with 25 columns of information for every pair of people who have batted together. But in the end, it can be distilled down to just two numbers:
Average score of batter who faces the first ball : 18.70
Average score of batter who does not face first: 15.04
I can immediately think of two things that make facing first appear "better".
1. Overall, facing a double-score ball gains batters more runs than they lose in wickets.
2. Most teams and pairs are more likely to put their stronger player on strike more often than not (most especially when the double-score was involved!)
So, does being first give you an advantage, or is it just the better batters making the option look good by taking the strike?
Who knows. Perhaps this will shed some light... a list of our players ranked by how often they face first:
| Player | Innings | Face First | Percentage |
| Brad | 150 | 110 | 73.3 |
| Xavier | 170 | 104 | 61.2 |
| Julian | 84 | 48 | 57.1 |
| Gareth | 128 | 73 | 57.0 |
| Andy | 156 | 87 | 55.8 |
| Rian | 137 | 75 | 54.7 |
| Jake | 75 | 31 | 41.3 |
| Daniel | 39 | 14 | 35.9 |
| Jim | 30 | 10 | 33.3 |
| Matt | 76 | 25 | 32.9 |
| Sanjit | 128 | 19 | 14.8 |
Given Brad at the top and Sanjit at the bottom, one can assume that their partnerships together are a big contributor. The numbers for the Brad/Sanj-pair give Brad facing 75 times to Sanjit's 10.
Strangely, Xavier and Julian come in second and third. Both are well above 50%, despite the fact that most of their innings were together. This indicates that when they don't bat together, they often take guard first. Indeed, if you look at Xavier's next most common pairings he has faced first 18 out of 22 innings with Daniel, 9/10 with Andy, 8/10 with Matt, and 9/10 with Sanjit!
But are we doing it right? Are we choosing the right people as the first-striker? Here is a list of our players ranked by their"first ball advantage" - the difference between their two averages
| Player | Avg when facing first | Avg when not first | Difference |
| Xavier> | 25.50 | 21.52 | +3.98 |
| Andy | 20.71 | 16.69 | +3.76 |
| Jake | 18.84 | 15.93 | +2.91 |
| Daniel | 20.64 | 17.80 | +2.84 |
| Gareth | 17.48 | 15.93 | +1.55 |
| Brad | 23.35 | 22.33 | +1.03 |
| Sanjit | 14.95 | 14.06 | +0.88 |
| Julian | 22.02 | 22.25 | -0.23 |
| Rian | 23.69 | 26.27 | -2.58 |
| Jim | 14.70 | 17.35 | -2.65 |
| Matt | 8.56 | 13.04 | -4.48 |
It seems the Popped Collars have got the right idea at each end of the scale - Xavier faces many first balls, and scores plenty more runs doing it, while Matt usually lets his partner go first and improves his own scores in doing so. There's some significant differences in some of those averages.
It would be interesting to see how these stats change if you only count games without 'double score' balls up first - to see how much that affects the results. Maybe I'll do that one day, but I'm not going back and adding that bit of info in now...
Specific Partnerships
Now for a slightly tricky table showing our regular partnerships. To get meaningful numbers I've only counted partnerships where batters have faced first at least 5 times each.
| Partnership | Pair Avg when this player faces first | This player's change in Avg when they face first | |
| Rian Gareth | 40.19 43.21 | -0.03 +3.00 | |
| Brad Sanjit | 37.00 43.00 | -1.93 +4.07 | |
| Julian Xavier | 43.16 46.97 | -0.78 +3.02 | |
| Andy Jake | 34.21 37.50 | +0.09 +3.38 | |
| Brad Xavier | 50.00 51.07 | -2.04 -0.98 | |
| Rian Jim | 39.00 39.00 | +4.60 +4.60 |
Hopefully you get what's being shown here - but as an example: Rian and Gareth have a higher average when Gareth faces first (43.21 compared to 40.19), and the reason for this is that Gareth's average is higher (+3.00), while Rian's remains almost unchanged (-0.03 when he faces first, therefore +0.03 when Gareth faces first).
Brad and Sanjit is my favourite one here. Clearly, they are doing it wrong! As we saw before, Brad takes strike most of the time between them, but both of them bat better when Sanj gets to go first! Sanjit has a massive 4 run improvement, while Brad will gain almost 2 by staying at the runner's end.
OK, that's all for today, I can't take any more looking at this table of numbers. Here's a link for anyone who wants to try getting their head around my giant colour-coded table and finding some more exciting "who faces first" stats!!
(After you open the link, you can click File > Download if you don't want to be forced to look at it in GoogleDocs)
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