Boundary percentage flatters the wrong batters

A high share of runs in fours and sixes usually means a batter got the easy deliveries, not that he manufactured anything.

Boundary percentage has quietly become the number people reach for when they want to sound analytical about a short-format innings. Runs in boundaries divided by total runs. High is good. Except high is very often just a description of what the bowler served up.

Think about what actually raises that ratio. Facing a bowler with a leg-side problem raises it. Batting while the field is up raises it enormously. Arriving at the death against a bowler who has to defend a boundary and therefore misses his length raises it. None of those are things the batter did. They are things that happened to him.

Meanwhile the ratio punishes the two skills that decide most tight run chases. Running hard between the wickets, which converts a mishit into two, drags the denominator up and the ratio down. Rotating strike against a spinner bowling into the surface with a sweeper out does the same. A batter who makes forty off twenty-eight with eleven twos on a slow pitch has done something close to remarkable, and the boundary percentage column will file him below a man who nicked three fours through a vacant slip cordon.

There is a version of the number I would keep. Boundary percentage against a specific bowling type, in a specific phase, compared against what every other batter managed in that phase at the same ground that season. That is a comparison. The raw figure is a coincidence with a decimal point.

The deeper problem is that boundary hitting is the most visible thing a batter does, so every metric built around it gets adopted fast and questioned slowly. Selectors like it because it matches what they remember from the highlights. Auction rooms like it because it fits on a slide.

What I would rather see published is the share of an innings played off the middle of the bat. Not runs. Contact quality. Whether that comes from ball tracking, from bat sensors or from a coach with a clicker, it tells you about the batter rather than about the fixture list.

Until then, the safest way to read boundary percentage is as a report on the bowling. It usually is.

I would not pick a squad on it. I am not sure I would pick an eleven on it either.