Cricket fans like using statistics to compare players to each other. Both batting and bowling statistics are published and consulted frequently to make the case that such-and-such a player is valuable to their team, or is one of the all-time greats. But there are a few different statistics that are used, and each of them has its disadvantages. I've been thinking about batting statistics, and I think I've come up with a new one that's interesting.

The simplest statistic is total runs scored. This is simply the sum of all the runs a batter has achieved in their career, across all matches. All-time runs scored gives a good overview of who's done a lot in their career, but of course it disproportionately rewards those who have played a lot of matches, even if they haven't got any particularly great scores. This naturally favours recent players, since a lot more matches are played each year now than there used to be in the past.

An alternative statistic is batting average, which is the average number of runs a player scores in an innings. (Actually it's the number of runs they've scored divided by the number of times they've been given out, so they're rewarded for finishing an innings not out.) This gives better recognition to players who played high-quality cricket but who didn't play many matches. For example it recognises Don Bradman with an average of 99.94, who was only able to play 52 matches because his career was in a period (1928–1948) when not as many matches were played. However, batting average throws up a lot of weird exceptions: batters who played just a couple of matches in their careers but managed to get a lucky high score or two. Bradman is the only player in the top 10 who played more than 3 matches.

It would be good to have a statistic that finds a balance between these two extremes, rewarding players for high-scoring innings but requiring them to do this many times to appear high up on the list. Two reasonable stats are 50s and 100s, showing the number of times a player has achieved that score in an innings. This is quite a balanced statistic, and there's a nice exclusive club of sixty players who have scored 50 50s, but it's a bit unsatisfying that it relies on these two arbitrary numbers. I want something more natural.

Academia has some inspiration for us here. The impact of academic authors is sometimes measured using h-index. According to Wikipedia, "The h-index is defined as the maximum value of h such that the given author/journal has published at least h papers that have each been cited at least h times." This is a good balance between rewarding quantity and rewarding quality, and is much harder to hack than either number of papers or number of citations in isolation.

I therefore propose the batting x-index: the highest number such that a batter has scored at least x runs in at least x innings. For example, if you've scored 50 50s, you can say your x-index is at least 50. But if you've also scored 51 51s, you can boast an x-index of 51. Have any players got 60 60s, or 70 70s?

I wrote a script to scrape some data from cricinfo, and I'm happy to say I've got some stats to share with you.

Sachin Tendulkar is the best player by this new metric, having scored 76 76s in his 24-year Test career. This is well ahead of the three players in joint second place with 69 69s: Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Jacques Kallis and Joe Root. Root is still active and playing this week, and therefore will pull ahead if he manages a 70 in this match.

Here are the all-time top 15 in men's Tests, in fact the 15 men who have score 60 60s.

Don Bradman just slips into the top 100 with 44 44s. One that surprised me is Stuart Broad, best known for his bowling but with a very respectable 32 32s before his retirement last year. I hope to look through the stats more in the future.

This is also a nice way to see how formidable the batting lineups are for the current England–India series. Here are all the players who've appeared in this series, showing quite a balanced pair of teams:

Goodness knows cricket has enough obscure stats already, but I thought this would be a nice little curiosity to add.