Strike rate should be priced by the phase it was scored in

A hundred and thirty in the middle overs is worth more than a hundred and sixty at the death.

Two players, one season, both in a franchise squad. The finisher goes at a hundred and sixty over roughly a hundred and twenty balls, almost all of them in the last five overs. The number three goes at a hundred and thirty over four hundred balls, mostly between overs seven and sixteen. The auction pays the finisher more and the discussion treats the comparison as obvious.

It is not obvious. It is not even close to being the same measurement, because the two men faced different bowling in different field settings with different consequences for failure.

Death overs are the easiest phase in which to score quickly. The field is spread, the bowler is defending, and every ball is either a yorker attempt or a mistake, and mistakes at that stage go for six. A hundred and sixty there is roughly par. The middle overs are the hardest, because a spinner is bowling into the pitch with a ring field and a sweeper, boundary options are limited to a few specific shots, and going at a run a ball takes genuine skill rather than a big swing.

So the correction is to compare each player to the phase, not to the format. Take the competition average strike rate for the overs a batter actually faced, weight by the balls he faced in each, and express his rate as a ratio to that expectation. Do the same for dismissal risk. The finisher's number falls. The number three's rises. Sometimes they cross.

There is a second adjustment, harder but more valuable, for the bowling faced. Facing the two best bowlers in a competition for a third of your balls is a materially different job from facing the fifth and sixth options. This is measurable and almost nobody publishes it.

The practical result of skipping both corrections is a market that overpays for finishers and underpays for the player who holds an innings together through the hardest phase. That is a systematic error, which is the good kind, because it means somebody willing to do the arithmetic can buy the undervalued player cheaply for several seasons before the market corrects.

A raw strike rate is not a lie. It is an answer to a question nobody asked, which is how fast this player scored against whatever happened to come along.