Domestic Batting performances

[bunny]

A number of exciting (batting) prospects came around in the last season, and it has coincided with the departure of SG and RD from ODIs, and SG from tests (with RD also expecting the boot anytime soon). This has opened up a couple of places in the Indian squad. So, this is a good time to look at the domestic performances. I have watched some Ranji games (now a days being broadcasted on Neo), and apart from Rohit Sharma and to an extent, Murali Vijay and B Kumar, I wasn't terribly excited at anybody's technique or talent. So, instead of letting my own eyes be the judge, I thought of coming up with some statistic which would give an idea as to who is the first among equals. Looking at the batting records it seemed that lots of players had a really good First class season. http://stats.cricinfo.com/indiandomestic2008/engine/records/batting/most_runs_career.html?class=4;host=6;id=2008%2F09;type=season These players (in no particular order) include Rahane, Pujara, Uthappa, Badrinath, Jaffer, Mukund, Karthik, R Sharma, P Patel, Thaker, Kaif, Jadeja, Dhawan and countless others. Total number of runs as a success criteria seemed meaningless to me, and we have had many Indian domestic champions (Rathour, Gandhi, Lamba, etc) with very good first class average failing at the international level. However, Rathour, Lal and Lamba have one thing in common. They have an unusually high conversion ratio (as in number of times they converted a 50 to 100) for somebody who don't average 60+. This had inflated their averages a lot. It convinced me that the % of 50+ scores was a better criterion to use than the average. Applying this creterion yields that Pujara, Mukund, Asnodkar, Uthappa, Tiwary, Raina and Jadeja score 50 less than once in 3 innings whereas Jaffer, Rahane, Rohit Sharma, Badrinath, Vijay, Dhawan, P Patel, D Karthik, Kohli were much more consistent. This statistic needs to be tested on the entire careers to make it more statistically relevant (a preliminary check indicated that the above measure was consistent in this respect as well). Also, seeing too many players from the same team indicates that an even better criterion might be needed which would take opposition bowling strength and also their own team members' performance into account. That said, I don't have too many hopes from Pujara, Tiwary, Mukund, Uthappa, and Asnodkar in the coming future.