The impact of home pitch on County Cricketers

Why talk about home pitches?  My simple answer is: “because they’re very important”.  We know that some tracks around the county circuit are helpful to bowlers, others help batsmen, a few help everyone and some don’t help anyone.  Now let’s pretend that we’re actually better cricketers than we are, and we’ve just broken into our chosen county side.  In my mind I’m now a gritty opening batsman at Northants, by the way.  What if my home pitch is a green-top where sides are regularly bowled out for 200?  I’m making my way in the game, but I know that in half of my matches I’m going to really have to struggle for my runs.  Meanwhile, my opening partner from school, a lesser player in the eyes of many, is playing on a pitch from heaven.  He’s scoring heavily, and is being talked up in the press as a future England player.  Back to reality, I’m sure you get the idea.  When we’re evaluating players we need to know as much about them as we can, and the pitch on which they play most of their matches is very important.  Now I’m going to show you how to quantify this.

Simply working out runs per wicket for each ground isn’t quite enough, since around half of the innings will have been by one particular team.  If that team has very good batsmen the wicket will seem to be good for batting, and vice-versa if a team is less able.  To counteract this we need to look at how well the same players perform away from the pitch, and use this as a measuring stick. 

Let’s use Kent as an example.  If we add up all runs scored by both teams at Canterbury, and divide by the number of wickets taken in these games, we get a batting average for Canterbury.  Now we need to work out how this compares to other grounds, so we look at all of Kent’s away games and add up all the runs scored by both teams in these.  We then work out the batting average for the away games.  Now we have a measure of how well two sets of players perform in our test condition (Canterbury) and also in our control condition (everywhere else).

The final step is to divide the home average by the away average, and multiply this by 100.  This gives an easy index number to help us measure one ground against another.  A value of 100 occurs if the home ground is completely neutral for run scoring.  This is illustrated below: 

This is 1998 data, which shows us that Canterbury was a very good pitch for batsmen that season.  However, there’s a chance that these figures can be skewed by any particularly good or bad innings, the weather or anything else you care to think of.  To make sure we’re getting accurate data we need to calculate these values over a longer time period.  The following figures are based on data from seasons 1998, 1999 and 2000.

We can see that half of the innings played by Nottinghamshire and Worcestershire players were on pitches that made batting very difficult.  At the other end of the scale Hampshire, Kent, Northants and Somerset played on some of the best batting tracks in the country. 

Finally, for what it’s worth, I leave you with a handful of players who have performed well in unfavourable conditions:  Hick (Worcs. – time and again), James (Glamorgan), Morris (Hampshire – bowled very well in batting conditions in both ‘98 and ‘99), Saggers & Headley (Kent) and Brown (Northants).