Prince EWS
Global Moderator
I kind of see your point, but equally the entire point of exercise was to try and remove variations in records that were created by circumstance of era alone. We have a man who played 42 consecutive Tests for his country over a 20 year period and we only want to give him credit for playing 10.6 years; seems wrong to me as there's nothing more he could've done in those 20 years but keep playing consecutively, and he did.Take the imaginary case of player A and player B: both start their careers in 1925 for different countries, play all matches till 1933. Both the countries don't play any test matches in 1934 and 1935. However, in 1936 A's country plays one test (where A also plays and retires after that), but B's country doesn't - however, B is still bossing it in FC and would have walked into the side. B's country, in fact, plays the next test in 1938 by which time B has just retired. Now, is it fair to B if A gets 3 more maturity years than him?
In essence, the reason Bruce Mitchell shouldn't get any points for years when SA doesn't play any test matches is the same as the reason WG Grace doesn't get any points for years prior to the first test, or, Graeme Pollock doesn't get any points for any of the apartheid years - i.e., 'they were unlucky that their countries haven't played any test matches'. Saying that Mitchell would've been playing in those missing years is in fact speculation, however realistic that speculation might be.
In the end Mitchell is only one example; I just think my original longevity formula tended to rate the top-end players more accurately. Yours sees Headley fall outside the top 20 or so for example which made me scratch my head a little. Yours tended to rate the middle-tier type players more accurately though and didn't throw up weird things like Umrigar > Sehwag.
To me there seems to be several options in deal with 'missing years'. Players who played either side can either be given credit for:
- none of it (0) - your system
- all of it (1)
- half of it (0.5) or another manually decided decimal - something I tinkered with just now
- whatever percentage of the rest of the matches they played during their career - my old system
- a combination of some of the above - perhaps a combination of #3 and #4 - what about half the percentage of the matches they played?