Boundary percentage means little until you adjust for the ground

Cricket grounds differ in size more than any other major sport's venues, and the batting numbers pretend otherwise.

Two batters finish a season with the same boundary percentage. One played half his innings on a ground with square boundaries you can reach with a good top edge. The other played on an outfield where a properly struck pull lands two yards inside the rope and gets run for two. The numbers say they are the same player. The numbers are wrong, and everybody involved knows it, and nobody adjusts.

Baseball fixed this decades ago with park factors, out of necessity, because a home run in one stadium is a fly out in another and the sport is built on the home run. Cricket has an equal or larger problem and has mostly shrugged at it. Boundary dimensions are not standardised beyond a minimum and a maximum, they vary within a single ground depending on where the strip has been cut, and they change between matches at the same venue. Nothing in a standard scorecard records any of it.

The fix is not conceptually hard. Record boundary distances at each of eight directions for every match, which grounds already know and increasingly publish, and express a batter's scoring against the distance he actually had to clear in the region he actually hits to. A leg side hitter at a ground with a short square boundary is getting a subsidy. A straight hitter at the same ground is getting nothing.

What makes this more than a curiosity is auction and selection money. Franchises pay for hitting power, and the cheapest available evidence of hitting power is boundary percentage. If that number is partly a description of where somebody happened to play his cricket, then teams are systematically overpaying for players from small grounds and underrating players from large ones. I would bet a reasonable sum that this is happening right now and that the mispricing is worth real money.

There is a fielding side to it too. Field restrictions interact with dimensions in a way that captains feel but rarely articulate. A sweeper on a seventy metre boundary is a genuine deterrent. The same fielder on an eighty five metre boundary is protecting an area the batter was not going to clear anyway, and the captain has effectively fielded with ten.

Until the adjustment exists, treat every boundary percentage as a claim about a player and a venue at once.

Mostly it is a claim about the venue.