Boundary percentage hides the batter who cannot rotate

A high proportion of runs in fours and sixes reads like power, and often reads like an inability to find a single.

Boundary percentage is one of those numbers that flatters the player it should indict. Take a batter who makes forty from thirty balls with six fours and two sixes. Twenty four runs in boundaries out of forty, which is a fine ratio, and it hides the twenty two balls that produced sixteen runs. Twenty two balls, mostly dots and singles, against bowling that he could not manoeuvre.

That is a specific weakness and it has a specific cause. Rotating the strike requires you to hit the ball into gaps square of the wicket and to run hard, and both of those depend on being able to work the ball off the back foot on either side of the pitch. Many modern batters cannot, because they have built a game around hitting through a small arc with a lot of force, and outside that arc they are defending.

Field settings punish this brutally. A captain who works out that a batter scores squarer than fine will simply post two men there and dare him to hit over the top, and the strike rate collapses for four overs while the boundary percentage stays high, because the runs he does score are still coming in fours.

The team cost is worse than the individual one. A batter who cannot rotate strands his partner. If the other end contains someone in form, the non rotator is denying him deliveries, and the innings loses more than the dot balls suggest. Two batters who both need the strike to score is a partnership that will produce roughly half what it should.

So if I were assessing a middle order I would ask for the dot ball percentage against spin in the middle overs before I looked at anything else. It is unglamorous, it never appears on a graphic, and it tells you almost everything about whether a player can bat in the phase where matches are decided.

The defence of the boundary hitter is real enough. In a format where a total is chased in twenty overs, the risk of trying to run threes is not worth it, and a player who clears the rope reliably is buying runs at a rate that singles cannot match.

Fine. But he is buying them from six deliveries and paying for them with twenty two.