Pinch hitting was never really about the hitting

Promoting an aggressive lower-order batter works because of what it does to the fielding captain, not the runs it usually produces.

The pinch hitter gets defended on the wrong grounds. People point at the innings where he made thirty off twelve and won a chase. Those are rare, and if you average the tactic across a season it looks close to neutral in runs. Which is why it keeps being abandoned and rediscovered every few years.

The value sits somewhere else. When a side promotes a bowler who can swing hard into the fourth over of a chase, the opposition captain has a decision he did not plan for. Does he keep his best seamer on against a man who might hole out in two balls, or save him for the batter who is padded up? Does he keep the field up, as the restrictions invite, or push a man back and lose the pressure the powerplay is supposed to create?

Both answers cost him something. That is the whole trick. The promoted batter is a question, and the run value of forcing a captain to answer a question early is not recorded anywhere.

There is also a squad-shape reason, and this one is underrated. A team that can promote a genuine hitter to number four in a chase and drop him back to eight in a defence has a flexible order, and a flexible order is worth more than any individual in it. Rigid orders get picked apart by attacks that know exactly which matchup arrives in which over. Once a captain has to guess, his bowling plan degrades before a ball is bowled.

The failure mode is promoting the wrong player. A tailender who slogs across the line is not a pinch hitter, he is a wicket with a shorter fuse. The player worth promoting is the one with one reliable scoring area against pace and the temperament to keep going at it, which is a specific and fairly rare combination.

What annoys me is that the tactic gets judged on the promoted batter's average. That number will be ugly forever. It is meant to be ugly. He is being sent out to take a risk that the team, not he, benefits from.

Judge it by what the opposition captain does in the next twenty minutes.