yorkr ranks IPL batsmen and bowlers

Here is a short post which ranks IPL batsmen and bowlers. These are based on match data from Cricsheet. Ranking batsmen and bowlers in IPL is more challenging as the players can belong to different teams in different years. Hence I create a combined data frame of the batsmen and bowlers regardless of their IPL teams and calculate a) average runs and average strike rate for batsmen and c) average wickets and d) average economy rate for bowlers.

I will be doing this ranking for T20 and ODI batting and bowling performances shortly.

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This post has also been published in RPubs RankIPLPlayers. You can download this as a pdf file at RankIPLPlayers.pdf.

You can take a look at the code at rankIPLPlayers (should be available in yorkr_0.0.5)

Checkout my interactive Shiny apps GooglyPlus (plots & tables) and Googly (only plots) which can be used to analyze IPL players, teams and matches.

The results are slightly surprising

rm(list=ls())
library(yorkr)
library(dplyr)
setwd("C:/software/cricket-package/cricsheet/cleanup/IPL/rank")
source("rankIPLBatsmen.R")
source("rankIPLBowlers.R")

Rank IPL batsmen

Chris Gayle, MEK Hussey and Shane Watson are top 3 IPL batsmen. Gayle towers over the others in mean runs and mean strike rate. Surprisingly Ajinkya Rahane is the top Indian T20 batsman, if we leave out Sachin Tendulkar (who tops India yet again!). The other top IPL T20 batsmen are Raina, Gambhir, Rohit Sharma in that order. Virat Kohli comes a distant 14th.

iplBatsmanRank <- rankIPLBatsmen()
as.data.frame(iplBatsmanRank[1:30,])

##             batsman matches meanRuns    meanSR
## 1          CH Gayle     128 40.00781 144.92188
## 2        MEK Hussey      64 33.57812 107.23500
## 3         SR Watson      75 31.46667 129.97733
## 4      SR Tendulkar     127 29.74803 108.86622
## 5         AM Rahane      77 29.14286 101.40065
## 6         DA Warner     134 29.10448 118.38313
## 7         JP Duminy      94 28.77660 124.61702
## 8          SK Raina     128 28.62500 122.12656
## 9         G Gambhir     210 28.13810 108.78090
## 10        RG Sharma     181 28.07182 118.57801
## 11         DR Smith      78 27.82051 119.64462
## 12      BB McCullum      98 27.81633 114.91255
## 13         S Dhawan     109 27.74312 112.21000
## 14          V Kohli     188 27.56915 113.81261
## 15   AB de Villiers     150 27.46000 136.70860
## 16         R Dravid     104 27.02885 107.78923
## 17        JH Kallis     167 26.54491  94.65641
## 18         V Sehwag     174 26.39655 140.29011
## 19       RV Uthappa     166 26.27711 120.48506
## 20       SC Ganguly      86 25.98837  96.39849
## 21     AC Gilchrist      81 25.77778 122.69074
## 22    KC Sangakkara      70 25.67143 112.97529
## 23         MS Dhoni     119 25.29412 130.99832
## 24       TM Dilshan      82 24.13415 101.12634
## 25          M Vijay      96 23.92708 102.01771
## 26        AT Rayudu     146 23.63014 117.91000
## 27 DPMD Jayawardene     109 22.95413 110.73862
## 28        MK Pandey     105 22.71429        NA
## 29     Yuvraj Singh     112 22.48214 114.51018
## 30      S Badrinath      66 22.22727 114.97061

Rank IPL bowlers

The top 3 IPL T20 bowlers are SL Malinga,SP Narine and DJ Bravo.

Don’t get hung up on the decimals in the average wickets for the bowlers. All it implies is that if 2 bowlers have average wickets of 1.0 and 1.5, it implies that in 2 matches the 1st bowler will take 2 wickets and the 2nd bowler will take 3 wickets.

iplBowlersRank <- rankIPLBowlers()
as.data.frame(iplBowlersRank[1:30,])

##             bowler matches meanWickets   meanER
## 1       SL Malinga      96    1.645833 6.545208
## 2        SP Narine      54    1.555556 5.967593
## 3         DJ Bravo      58    1.517241 7.929310
## 4         M Morkel      37    1.405405 7.626216
## 5        IK Pathan      40    1.400000 7.579250
## 6         RP Singh      42    1.357143 7.966429
## 7         MM Patel      31    1.354839 7.282581
## 8  Shakib Al Hasan      32    1.343750 6.911250
## 9    R Vinay Kumar      63    1.317460 8.342540
## 10       MM Sharma      46    1.304348 7.740652
## 11         P Awana      33    1.303030 8.325758
## 12        MM Patel      30    1.300000 7.569667
## 13          Z Khan      41    1.292683 7.735854
## 14        A Mishra      43    1.255814 7.226512
## 15         PP Ojha      53    1.245283 7.268679
## 16     JP Faulkner      40    1.225000 8.502250
## 17     DS Kulkarni      32    1.156250 8.372188
## 18        UT Yadav      46    1.152174 8.394783
## 19        A Kumble      41    1.146341 6.567073
## 20       JA Morkel      73    1.136986 8.131370
## 21        SK Warne      53    1.132075 7.277170
## 22 Harbhajan Singh     107    1.102804 7.014953
## 23        L Balaji      34    1.088235 7.186176
## 24        R Ashwin      92    1.065217 6.812391
## 25        AR Patel      31    1.064516 7.137097
## 26  M Muralitharan      39    1.051282 6.470256
## 27         P Kumar      36    1.027778 8.148056
## 28       PP Chawla      85    1.023529 8.017765
## 29       SR Watson      67    1.014925 7.695224
## 30        DJ Bravo      30    1.000000 7.966333

Conclusion: The results are somewhat surprising. The ranking was based on data from Cricsheet. The data in this site are available from 2008-2015. I hope to do this ranking for T20 and ODIs shortly

Important note: Do check out my other posts using yorkr at yorkr-posts

Watch this space!