Strike rate is a description of the field, not the batter

Two batters can score at identical rates while facing entirely different problems, and the raw number hides which is which.

Give me a batter with a strike rate of 140 and I still do not know whether he is any good. I know something about the deliveries he was allowed to face. That is not the same thing.

Here is the mechanism people skip. Scoring rate is largely a function of how many fielders can reach the ball you have just hit. In the first six overs of a limited-overs innings, with the ring closed, a mistimed drive that would be a comfortable single later on runs away for four. Later, with a spread field and a bowler operating to a well-set trap, the same shot is worth nothing at all. The bat did the same thing. The number did not.

So when a broadcast graphic puts a career strike rate next to a name, it is mostly telling you which slot in the order that player has occupied and which phases his captain has trusted him with. Openers in white-ball cricket are given the easiest scoring conditions in the sport and are then praised for exploiting them. Middle-order players who walk in at forty for three against a leg spinner with a sweeper on either side are penalised for the situation.

The adjustment is not complicated, and good analysts already make it. You compare a batter against the expected scoring rate for that phase, that bowler type and that ground, then look at the difference. Suddenly the anchor who scores at 118 while everyone around him manages 105 against the same attacks looks like an asset rather than a liability, and the flat-track opener at 145 in a phase where the baseline is 142 looks like a passenger.

I will accept one objection. Selectors cannot run a model in the middle of a meeting, and headline numbers exist because they are portable. Fine. But the portable number should at least be split by phase. Publish powerplay, middle and death rates separately and the argument mostly resolves itself, because the batters who are genuinely difficult to bowl at are strong in more than one of them.

What I would stop doing is comparing career figures across eras and formats as though the units were stable. They are not. Field restrictions changed. Bat edges changed. Boundary ropes moved in.

The number is a receipt for conditions. Read the conditions.