Is MS Dhoni the most valuable batsman in the IPL, the richest cricket franchise in the World?
Who is the most valuable batsman in the IPL cricketing franchise? Who is the highest run-scorer in the IPL? Who’s got the best strike rate in the IPL? Can we perform a fully data-driven approach to answer this question?
Background
To the uninitiated, IPL stands for the Indian Premier League, a professional Twenty20 cricket league in India contested over a period of 2–3 months in the early summer every year. 8–10 teams representing different city franchises vie for top honors in this competition.
This was a completely new ‘blue ocean’ uncontested market created from scratch by Lalit Modi. This concept turned out to be a huge hit in cricket-crazy India, featuring the best players, from across the cricketing world, slugging it out against each other. It was a disruption in cricket, not quite unlike the World Series Cricket introduced by Kerry Packer in 1979.
In its checkered history, IPL has fended off rivals such as the Indian Cricket League, had a fair share of controversy with its founder-chairman accused of corruption, and is a whipping boy for geopolitical tensions. There have been 12 editions of IPL, so far from the inaugural 2008 season won by the Rajasthan Royals to the recently concluded 2019 season, won by the Mumbai Indians. The IPL brand is now valued at $6.3 billion.
If you are from one of the cricket playing nations, you will be aware of the ongoing 2019 ICC World Cup. The favorites to win this time are England, India (2-time winners) and Australia (5-time winners). Incidentally, war-torn Afghanistan is competing in the World Cup for the first time. How does war-torn Afghanistan feature in the World Cup? A big part of the answer is the increasing exposure of Afghan players to world class cricket in the form of IPL.
Understand and Prepare the Data from IPL
IPL is a treasure trove of cricket data and hence analyzing IPL results could well prove to be interesting. Its played in the exciting 20–20 format. The 12th edition of IPL completed on May 12 with the Mumbai Indians winning an easy win.
I started off first checking Kaggle to see if an IPL dataset was available. The data was available only till 2017. I then looked at Cricsheet and got a zip file for all 12 years. Data however was in the YAML format which looked something like this
These scorecard files, while relatively easy to create can’t be analyzed in the raw format. A few sessions of intense data munging in Python resulted in a couple of manageable data-files that could then be analyzed in detail.
This resulted in the creation of 2 csv files which were then loaded onto Kaggle as an IPL dataset for others also to analyze.
- 1. Match summary csv with 21 columns and 756 rows. Each row corresponding to an individual match, the teams, date of the match, match outcome etc. as below
- 2. Another showing each individual delivery — details of 178490 deliveries each with 41 columns of information — bowler, batsman, runs scored, wicket taken etc.
These 2 files were mined for insights to answer our question ‘Who is the most valuable batsman in the IPL?’
Insights
- Analysis of 12 years worth of IPL data revealed the following:
Table below shows comparison of the top 10 batsman by runs_scored
A few points become evident: there’s very little to separate these valuable batsmen but lets visualize these stats
Plot of batting averages and strike rate shows some clear leaders
Gayle, Dhoni and Warner stand out in making their innings count making higher 40+ averages
Strike rate swarm - each dot represents a strike rate for an inning
Run swarm- each dot represents an inning
Gayle’s 175 is depicted as the dot in the extreme right
Swarm of balls faced
Warner and Dhoni don’t give away their wickets cheaply — on avg they stay longer in the crease
One reason these top players are on the list are because they open the innings — they have a greater probability of playing longer innings i.e. Gayle, Warner, Sharma, Dhawan, Gambhir, Uthappa make the cut as openers
A team gets 120 deliveries on average and a batsman getting a 100 is very improbable i.e. make sure you face the maximum number of balls and also score at a high clip. Scoring centuries is a singularly outstanding achievement and repeating his multiple times make Gayle (6), Kohli (5), Warner (4), and AB (3) extremely valuable.
Evaluation and Results
So, who is the most valuable batsman in the IPL?
- Analysis of 12 years worth of IPL data revealed the following:
- a single metric can’t be used to gauge utility — one needs to look at a combination of factors — such as total runs scored, strike rate, batting averages, batting longevity, farming vs striking etc.
- Total runs scored — SK Raina with 5,352 runs overall emerges as the highest run-scorer in the IPL
- Other metrics could be the clip at which runs are scored i.e. strike rate — Long time observers of the IPL wouldn’t at all be surprised that CH Gayle is head and shoulders above the rest in terms of strike rate (1.52)
- Dhoni performs well across multiple of these parameters — runs scored, batting avg, strike rates, longevity etc.
Given this what’s even more remarkable is that Dhoni who comes in after the fall of a couple of wickets, stays longer, hits more runs at a higher strike rate and with more consistency. MS Dhoni could well be considered the most valuable batsman at the IPL.
