Abstract:
It seems relevant that commentators would want to describe how hard a cricketer hits a ball. This may be measured
by the ratio of the number of runs achieved to the number of scoring strokes made, within any particular
context. The higher this slog factor, the harder the ball is hit. An investigation of Australian representative
cricketers over a three-year period has been carried out and shows the average slog factor for them to be around
2.2 in tests and 1.8 in one-day matches. Perhaps more importantly, the slog factor has a practical use in describing
the distribution of runs scored by a batsman and hence in determining the probability that the batsman scores
a century, say. It turns out, however, that this probability varies little with the slog factor, but depends more on
the batsman's true batting average. The result will be compared with that from a more empirical argument in a
recent paper.
