IPL’s Unique Selling Proposition – Not Statistics, but Arithmetic, and No Sense

 

IPL’s Unique Selling Proposition – Not Statistics, but Arithmetic, and No Sense

I read a short piece in The Hindu (May 20, 2025) about what the IPL player B. Sai Sudharsan (on the roster of Gujarat Titans) is doing to making him an essential in his team. He cannot be discarded. So be it.

But, how so? He wasn’t scoring explosively in the first six overs, a team needs an average of not less than 10.56 per over. That is, at the end of the first six overs, if the team scored 63.36 runs it was not the right track.

You open your calculator in your mobile and find that the team had scored 63.36 runs in the first six overs! I am no one to disagree or defend myself if you thought that I had gone off the deep end. Yet, let me make my case.

At the end of every over, the runs scored in an over must be an integer number, and so should be the total runs scored up to that point. Ergo, it must be an integer at the end of 20 overs, had the team survived that far without being all out!

Despite his being an opener, Mr. Sai Sudharsan’s strike rate, “hovering just over 140 in 2023 and 2024 ...”, and only 8.4 runs in six balls, the team seems to have reposed much faith in him. In the first six overs (PowerPlay), his strike rate reached a nadir in 2023, 117.64, and sunk even lower, to 115.49 in 2024.

I know I irritate my readers every which way; yet, I hope the statistics given above would irritate them further. There is nothing wrong with statistics per se, but as a viewer and without my trusted calculator with me as I watch IPL, these double, triple decimal point precision grates on my nerve. Assume he faced 60 balls in a match (his partner, who also stayed the full slate of another 60 balls); find out for yourself the difference between the runs the batsman scored in 2024 and 2023.

No, I will be merciful and offer the answers: for 117.64 it is 70.58, and for 115.49, 69.29. The difference between the two is 1.29 runs, over 60 balls! But, over say 28 balls, the difference comes down to 0.606. I do not believe these differences are statistically insignificant. I would consult Prof. S. Varadhan of Courant Institute of Mathematical Science, to waste his time, and find out whether I am wrong. I am bound to be, but not in any significant way.

The writer was lazy, and tried to bamboozle us with numbers going beyond integers and into decimals (after all, Indian mathematicians came up with this system, didn’t they). There is one more such number and see whether it makes more sense than the other two. The number is 157.56. Again, using 60 balls, 94.36, and using 28 balls, 44.12. Yes, 94.36 is significantly different than 70.58 (2024) and also than 69.29 (2023).

Transcribe the numbers in letters, like saying, in 2025, Mr. B. Sai Sudharsan broke out of his funk and carried the responsibility lightly yet in a royal manner as compared to 2024 or 2023! That makes readers remember the breaking out more lastingly, at least till 2026!

The telling statement of the player in this regard: “...mentally I am a bit more free and expressive.” I take this to mean that he has fallen out of the numbers nest and into expressing his results more expansively.

Good for him, his team, and for those who enjoy watching him between the creases.

Another beef from me on IPL telecasts. The score was 152 runs for four wickets at 15 overs and three balls (it is given in numbers as 152/4 in 15.3; the point in the overs is not a decimal, please note). Then, the screen showed the following: at the current rate, the score at the end of the innings is 196; at the rate of 11 runs an over, it is 202; at the rate of 12, 206.  The above numbers come out of simple arithmetic! No statistics, none at all. The telecasters are fooling themselves as the total number of runs hardly matches any of the set of numbers thrown up on the screen. This was one particular instance.

Going beyond such particular instances, and trying to generalize it, the problem is with the people in the print and video media. The telecasters would not let emptiness (almost) fill the TV screen, iPad or mobile screen. They rather wish to fill them with garbage details. Telecasting is a visual art form, and it demands uncluttered screen. Tell that to the director. I have fought this much of my professional career in India, working with someone who wanted no empty space in his .ppt slides. I would vomit all over it just to fill up space.

I was a guest in the house of a dentist over Christmas Holidays. It was so open, except for the small family room with a reclining chair, a couch and a couple of single-seaters, to watch TV. It was warm and cosy. But, this is the thing, the large bed rooms, the dining room and the kitchen were spacious, not cluttered yet exuded warmth. Substitute silence to warmth and you get my preference for what I wish to hear in IPL telecasts. John McEnroe on Wimbledon is the consummate narrator, knowing when to keep silent. Oh, how I miss him.

I was venting my spleen, take it or leave it.

Raghuram Ekambaram