An average built on not-outs is a bookkeeping trick

Dividing runs by dismissals rewards the player who is protected by the tail and punishes the one asked to take risks.

The batting average has one structural oddity that everybody knows about and almost nobody adjusts for. Not outs do not count as an innings in the denominator. A player who finishes unbeaten on twenty in eight innings out of thirty has effectively been handed eight free bonuses, and his average rises without a single extra run being scored beyond what he made.

In the longer format this matters less, because not outs are rarer and mostly belong to a genuine tail ender or to a declaration. In limited overs cricket it distorts everything. The finisher who bats at six in a successful chase is not out by definition, week after week, and his average climbs into the fifties while the man at three who is asked to bat through and accelerate carries every failure in full.

So a middle order number six with an average of fifty five and a number three with an average of forty are usually not what the numbers say. They may be identical players in different jobs, and one of those jobs comes with a statistical subsidy.

The proposed fixes all have problems. Dividing runs by innings rather than dismissals punishes a genuine finisher unfairly, because a small unbeaten score at the end of a chase is a complete success and counting it as a failed innings is absurd. Adjusting only for not outs above a threshold is arbitrary. Runs per ball sidesteps the issue and answers a different question.

My preference is to stop trying to compress a batter into one number and to report runs per innings alongside average and to let people see the gap, because the size of the gap is itself informative. A large gap tells you the player is being protected. A small one tells you he is exposed.

None of this is new. It has been argued about for a century and the average survives because it is familiar, and because selection committees like a number they can put in a column and defend.

What has changed is that we now have every ball of every match logged, and we could stop using a metric designed for a scorer with a pencil in eighteen ninety. We do not. Habit is the strongest force in this sport.