Let me jump straight to the point - The bowling statistics available today talk about a given bowler's individual performance. It does not provide a scale to compare them against other bowlers. (I say this because an economy of 5.25 for example is an absolute number and does not give us any idea on whether the bowler performed better or worse than another bowler in the same set of matches. The same argument can be extended to other stats used today.)
What I have attempted here is to come with statistics that provide us an idea of one's performance relative to the others in a given match or over his career.
So how do you judge a bowler today? Anyone who follows a good amount of cricket would put up his or her hand and say "Economy and Wickets". Some might actually say "Economy and Average". 'Average' being the average (duh!) number of runs a bowler gives away per wicket. A few might venture out to say "Economy, Average and Strike Rate". 'Strike rate' being the number of deliveries per wicket. But all these numbers are absolute numbers, specific only to that bowler and in no way provide a relative scale for ranking one bowler over the other.
What I am introducing here are two numbers, that I would like to call the Eco-variance and Strike-efficiency.
Eco-variance is the percentage delta between the bowler's economy and the innings run-rate, averaged over the career or the selected number of matches. If the bowlers economy is better than the innings run rate of the opposition in the matches under consideration, then the eco-variance would be a positive number, else negative. Obviously, positive numbers means he has bowled better than the other bowlers, in terms of the runs given away.
Strike-efficiency is the percentage delta between the number of wickets the bowler has taken per run given away by him in the match, and the total number of wickets taken per run given away by all bowlers together. Again this number is averaged over the career or the selected number of matches. If the bowler had taken more wickets-per-run, than the wickets-per-run for the entire innings, then the strike-efficiency would be a positive number, else negative. Again, positive numbers mean he has bowled better than the others, in terms of the wickets taken.
Having said this, I will pause, before I produce the numbers I got from the extensive number crunching I had been doing over the last few weeks. I have kept it down to the Indian bowlers, in ODIs for now. The idea was to release this in time before the WC, so I could analyse and criticize the team selection ;) But then, I said, lets do it atleast before the quarter finals :)
Note: I am also working on similar numbers for batsmen. These details are not to be used in other forms without my prior permission ;-)
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