Who’re the best batsmen in cricket today? Is there a way to define a set of objective criteria that provides an unbiased conclusion? In my last post, I selected a list of top batsmen in the history of cricket, by simply filtering all batsmen who have had a career batting average of 50 or more in any format. Prior to that I eliminated newcomers, specialist bowlers and unsuccessful players by another set of filters.
In a previous post, I used data from Statsguru and looked at a brief history of cricket with respect to debut years and career spans of players. In this post, I use detailed player statistics from the same dataset to select top batsmen who have played this game.
Distribution of matches played by all players
Let’s take a look at the summary statistics of number of matches played by all players in each format of the game.
Since early childhood, I have been a big fan of cricket. Some of my earliest childhood memories are watching the game along with my loved ones in India. As much as I can recall, the first series I saw was between India and the West Indies during the early 80s, on a black and white TV set. Watching Sunil Gavaskar play the fearsome West Indian fast bowlers with aplomb, made me his fan…until a kid named Sachin Tendulkar arrived in 1989.