Shane Watson vs Marcus North

[Bijed]

Somewhat inspired by discussions going on in other threads, lets see who people rate more highly out of the batsman averaging 35 who could normally be relied on to get a start but not much more and his contemporary the hollywood-or-bust type batsmen who also averaged 35.

Judgments should be based on their test batting alone

 

[Shri]

Australia would have been in a better place if Lehmann's and North's births were reversed.

 

[Howe_zat]

As a general rule, I think getting 35 is worth more than people give it credit for. People will talk about 'match winning' innings and that's obvious but

a) The real currency of batting is partnerships, and getting 35 can ultimately be an important part of one depending on context
b) The difference between the 0 and 35 is much, much larger than the difference between 100 and 135 as far as match impact is concerned, not so much in terms of runs but in terms of momentum/oppertunities for the bowling side/ something

Conversely the thing that really kills you as a batting side is single-figure scores.

 

[Bijed]

Do you think North would be regarded more highly if his career had been the same length as Watson's, even if it had maintained roughly its same pattern. What I mean is extrapolate North's career over 60 or so tests and he ends up with 14 or 15 tons, which I think would inherently make people rate him more highly, even if he still averaged 35.

 

[S.Kennedy]

North lives 'oop here. He was briefly at Durham and is now involved with the leagues here.

Australia had some fairly ordinary teams during that period.

 

[Prince EWS]

As a general rule, I think getting 35 is worth more than people give it credit for. People will talk about 'match winning' innings and that's obvious but

a) The real currency of batting is partnerships, and getting 35 can ultimately be an important part of one depending on context
b) The difference between the 0 and 35 is much, much larger than the difference between 100 and 135 as far as match impact is concerned, not so much in terms of runs but in terms of momentum/oppertunities for the bowling side/ something

Conversely the thing that really kills you as a batting side is single-figure scores.

Reminds me of that number-crunching I did on the correlation between each score and not-losing; it seemed to very much back up what you're saying.

 

[Prince EWS]

Actually, seems like that number-crunching was actually inspired by your very idea in the first place.

Be interested to see that. I reckon making 35 is much more effective than people give it credit for, for example, but have nothing to back that up

Yeah, I'm setting it up now. My database doesn't have results in it so I'm having it go and mine different StatsGuru queries; it'll take an hour or two to actually do that.

Okay so I've done this and I'm pretty surprised by the results. They seem to back up your feeling that the difference between 0 and 35 is actually the biggest difference of 35 that exists.

Here's how we measure contributions currently through raw averages: completely linearly.
View attachment 22069

Here's the function Spark designed largely to measure big scores non-arbitrarily.

View attachment 22070

But here's the actual historical correlation between each score and not losing (I chose not losing rather than winning because I figured the difference between drawing and winning is almost always bowling rather than batting).

View attachment 22072

To explain that graph a bit, I'll give some examples. At 50 on the x-axis, the y-axis reads 0.672. That means that 67.2% of the scores of 50 (actually, 40-60, as I took in wide births to avoid anomalies on the graph, but that's not really important as it didn't change the overall shape of it) are made in teams that don't go on to lose. Given it's actually 52.04% at 0, it's basically showing that, historically, there's greater value in getting to 50 than converting a 50 into a ton (79.5% at 100).

It backs up the Spark function idea that there's little material difference between 250 and anything higher than that, but the way sub-150 scores work seems to be the opposite of the Spark function, which surprised me greatly. Avoiding low scores has historically been a better way to not-lose than having a player make a really big one. I do wonder if that's being thrown off by tailenders (particularly given they bat less in general in winning teams) or pre-war cricket in some way.. I might try to exclude them and see what happens to it.

 

[Daemon]

Joe Root WAG

 

[stephen]

North was a mystery. Nearly always would get a hundred if he got to 20. I've never seen another batsman as polarised in his innings spread as North. No bell curve from him.

Having said that I think both have their pluses and minuses. One always got the feeling that Australia were let down when Watson got out once set. If he could have turned more of those 80s into 120s we'd have been able to win more tests.

With North you never really expected much but when he did come off it usually won is the match.

But again, this feeling is probably just a feeling and both had similar batting contributions to the team.

 

[Bijed]

It backs up the Spark function idea that there's little material difference between 250 and anything higher than that, but the way sub-150 scores work seems to be the opposite of the Spark function, which surprised me greatly. Avoiding low scores has historically been a better way to not-lose than having a player make a really big one. I do wonder if that's being thrown off by tailenders (particularly given they bat less in general in winning teams) or pre-war cricket in some way.. I might try to exclude them and see what happens to it.

Did you ever look into that last bit? Be interesting to know what you found if so.

 

[Prince EWS]

Did you ever look into that last bit? Be interesting to know what you found if so.

Yeah it didn't change much at all when I limited it to those batting 1-7.