I was thinking about ways to quantitatively measure a player's involvement in a game.
When we speak about a player's involvement within a game, we tend to think about how many deliveries they bowled/batted/fielded. A player whose had a big game is one that has batted or bowled a huge amount. A high impact player is one who, within a relatively small amount of deliveries, has a big influence on the outcome of a game.
When it comes to batsmen and bowlers, a player who has faced or bowled more deliveries can be said to have had a greater degree of involvement within a game than the others. But how would you compare between a batsman and a bowler? Does one delivery bowled equal to one delivery batted? That sounds about right to me. But, in theory, there is a limit to how much a bowler can bowl - even if they don't have a quota, they can still only bowl from just one end. So they can only bowl between 20% (LO) to 50% (Multi Day) of the deliveries their team bowls. Batsmen could, in theory, face every single ball. So is this a fair comparison? Batsmen may never get a chance to bat, or can be dismissed after just one ball. A bowler gets atleast 6 (unless they get injured mid-over). So it seems that the range of a batsman's involvement in a game has large extremes (literally from 0 to 'the whole innings'), but a bowlers is within a smaller range. Do we still equate one ball faced to one ball bowled?
And how about a wicket-keeper's involvement in a game? A wicketkeeper clearly is more important than the fielder you park at fine leg. The question is - are they involved for every single delivery in a fielding innings? Or do you only count the balls they actually have to collect? Is a wicket-keepers involvement during any given delivery the same of that of a random fielder's (IE - they're only involved if the ball goes to them), or is their involvement higher because they're in such a critical position?
Speaking of which - not every fielder's involvement is the same either. We know that. At different stages of the game, the ball is more likely to travel to different areas of the ground, and you need your best fielders in those areas. That means that two fielders in the same team in the same game can have drastically different involvement in the game. But quantifying this could be next to impossible. Do you just measure the number of balls fielded? What about a fielder who is parked at slip but never has an edge come their way? They have to be a lot more focused and involved that some of the other fielders, but when quantifying it you'll end us just saying they had no involvement, which isn't true.
Thoughts?
