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The selection of Australia’s Test cricket team always incites fierce controversy and criticism of the selectors. Observing recent selections it is clear that the Australian selectors are not adopting a Moneyball approach.
Moneyball is the system made famous by Billy Beane in Major League Baseball to assess the suitability of players based entirely on statistics. If the selectors haven’t read the Michael Smith novel they should, or at least see the Brad Pitt movie.
Cricket is probably the game most like baseball in that it is a team sport with masses of quantifiable data to assess individual performances and how they then correlate to team’s success. In essence, cricket is an individual sport within a team sport.
Now like all academic systems the thought is obviously that there must be exceptions to the Moneyball system but Beane is reported as stating that the success in the system is actually in having complete faith in the data and not straying from it.
Beane was quoted in the Michael Lewis novel as saying that when considering rookie recruitment prospects for his Major League team, that he did all possible to avoid meeting potential recruits face to face as it left him with an undoubted bias. His theory was that they had to make it on performance alone and seeing the strapping six foot two youngster and meeting his nice parents was only going to confound the decision.
Prior to Beane, the ‘vibe’ of recruiters was a key element. The old “I just knew when I saw him that he was going to make it” attitude. This is where we seem to stand in Australian cricket today.
The more I read about Moneyball, the more Shane Watson comes to mind. He is 34 and commentators still talk of his potential and being better than his statistics tell you. Fact is that he averages less than 35 in a role that many of his peers have done better and yet been punted.
Watson has survived on being an all-rounder yet seems to despise the term and repeatedly indicates he wants to be seen and selected purely as a top order batsman, even though there is no doubt that if he couldn’t bowl that he would not be selected. Yet when you look at his bowling figures he has not taken more than one wicket in an innings since 2011 and constantly talks of workload in the field affecting his batting.
The player that comes to mind at the opposite end of the spectrum is the recently deceased Phil Hughes. I heard Allan Border late last year strongly pushing his case, saying quite simply “I don’t know what he has to do to prove he is a Test player. He made back to back centuries in his second Test and every time he has been dropped he has gone back to the next level and made more runs than anyone else.”
“If you compare his figures with any other 25 year old and he is miles in front as far as First class centuries but the selectors just seem to think there is something in his game that doesn’t quite look right. He does have a different technique but if he had been played since his first selection he would now I have no doubt he may now have 50 Tests behind him and be in the top 10 batsmen in the world”.
Moneyball is all about embracing difference. Pitchers that look ‘slingy’ and sidearm that other teams avoid are snapped up as their statistics tell you they do the job.
Hughes typifies this attitude, much of his batting was unconventional and looked downright ugly at times, but his stats repeatedly did the talking in Sheffield Shield cricket. Now the irony might be that without Hughes and the similarly consistent Usman Khawaja now injured there are very few players who have the numbers to push their cause.
I’m not sure but I could guarantee it isn’t Joe Burns … but gee doesn’t he hit the ball sweet?
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