More or Less: How reliable is Kevin Pietersen?
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Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service, your essential guide to numbers in the news and in life. And I'm Tim Harford. This week we'll be asking whether zero is an even number, following this from the Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg.
Those with license plates ending in an even number or the number zero will be able to buy gas or diesel only on even number days, such as Saturday, November 10th.
But first, we're not ones to be churlish here on More or Less, but we're here to ask some hard questions about England cricketer Kevin Peterson and the quality of his batting. I'm sure he can take it. He may be the darling of English cricket, but if your life depended on someone scoring a century, would you send Kevin Peterson out to bat? Yes.
Peter Harvey sent us a letter from Perth in Australia to ask us this very question, and he also says... But is he? Or can we?
So does Kevin Peterson's batting average tell us much about how well he might perform in this imaginary life-saving challenge? Rob Easterway is a member of the Association of Cricket Statisticians and he co-devised the International Cricket Council's World Rankings, which were developed in order to address some of the flaws in the batting average.
Averages are not a bad reflection of what you've done over a whole career, but they do have a number of flaws, especially looking at a shorter period of time. First of all, they give no sense of how inconsistent a batsman is. You get 0-100, 0-100. That's the same average as if you get 50 every time. They also take no account of who you've made those runs against or whether it was a low-scoring match and they were more significant runs. And they don't really reflect form either, so they will tend to deaden over your career or average moves less and less the more matches that you've played. Rob, you've been thinking about Peter's question.
I suppose two questions, actually. specifically on the question of betting your life on kevin peterson scoring a century presumably you don't want a consistent batsman because a typical high quality batsman would average 45 or 50 wouldn't average anywhere near 100 which is a century so you actually want someone who's wildly inconsistent rather than someone who who always gets 40 45 50 60 and then gets out you want you want somebody who will occasionally score 100 otherwise you've got no chance
Well, that's a really interesting point, and cricketers would argue that either way. So a consistent batsman, it's nice to have someone you know you can rely on, a good solid base for the team to build their innings around, someone who scores 50 every time. And someone like Andrew Strauss, who's now retired, was a good consistent batsman. But then, yes, they're unlikely to be the ones who do the spectacular match-winning performance, as Kevin Peterson did with his 186. OK, so you're ducking this question of betting your life on a century.
That's probably very sensible. We don't encourage such bets. So to come back to the question of whether he's valuable to the England team, you said the context matters.
Well, yes. If you're playing against a really strong side like Australia, then it's going to be harder to score runs than if you're playing against one of the weaker sides like Bangladesh. So what you'd really want to do is adjust the runs for the context of the game to say who's it against and what proportion of the team's runs are you actually scoring against.
So how does Peterson rate? Does he make big scores when other players are not scoring? It's often said about Ian Bell, I think, that he only scores centuries when someone else has already scored a century. I mean, is that true about Bell? And is Peterson different?
How anomalous was Kevin Pietersen’s low score in the first Test and why does it matter?
Yeah, there is some truth in that. If you look at just proportion of teams runs scored, for example, Kevin Peterson's close to 15% of, you know, when he plays, he scores about that, whereas Ian Bell is 12.5%.
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