In 2002, Billy Beane, assisted by Paul DePodesta, and the Oakland Athletics front office revolutionised the way that baseball was played forever. Prior to the start of the season, Oakland saw the departure of three key players. By looking at statistics in a way no-one ever had before, Beane and his cash-strapped team responded with a series of under-the-radar free agent signings and were able to assemble one of the most dominant teams in baseball history.

The new-look Athletics, complete with a pitcher who threw sidearm, a first baseman who couldn’t throw due to nerve damage and a 36-year-old believed to be past his prime, were all systematically hand-picked by the Athletics staff to play on their team.

Despite a comparative lack of star power, the 2002 Oakland Athletics surprised the baseball world by besting the 2001 team’s regular season record by winning 103 out of 162 matches. The team is perhaps most famous for winning 20 consecutive games between August 13 and September 4, 2002. It remains the third-longest streak in MLB history.

The story of their season has been immortalised forever in Michael Lewis’s 2003 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (Lewis was given the opportunity to follow the team around throughout the season) and a 2011 film adaptation of the book, also titled Moneyball. The statistical analysis and player evaluation methods used by the 2002 Oakland Athletics are still used today in baseball.

Cricket is a bat-and-ball game very similar to baseball in many aspects. In both cricket and baseball there are batsmen, bowlers (pitchers) and fielders and both games are won by scoring more runs than the opposition team. The two sports are also unique in the sense that they are team sports with very individualised aspects to them.

What the fielders do has no impact on the type of delivery a bowler is going to bowl. Certainly the captain can tell his bowler where to bowl, but it is up to the bowler to execute and take wickets. Same with batting. Although batting with a partner at the non-striker’s end, the responsibility of scoring runs is placed firmly on the shoulders of the striking batsman.

It was in the mid-1970s that Bill James, a University of Kansas graduate of economics and literature, became obsessed with the idea of writing down his thoughts on baseball, in response to having things he absolutely needed to say that he was unable to convey any other way.

James collected his musings on baseball in a self-published 68-page book—photocopied and stapled together by himself—known as the 1977 Baseball Abstract: Featuring 18 Categories of Statistical Information That You Just Can’t Find Anywhere Else.

Just 75 people found it alluring enough to purchase via a single one-inch advertisement in The Sporting News, but repeated and expanded issues published almost yearly since eventually found their way to Paul DePodesta and later, Billy Beane. Using new statistics and mathematical formulas, which James dubbed ‘Sabermetrics’, the Athletics could analyse players in a much more in-depth way than ever done previously.

Baseball thinking was medieval. A large part of the early sabermetrics revolution showed that fielding was an overrated skill, whereas getting on base was an underrated skill.

Cricket thinking is medieval. We already mentioned how cricket is unique, but cricket is even more unique because of its three formats: Test cricket, One-Day cricket (50 overs) and Twenty20 cricket (20 overs). These distinctions are very important.

Statistics that are appropriate for evaluating players in Test cricket have no place in the shortest format of the game, Twenty20 cricket. Cricket’s youngest brother is essentially a different game to Test cricket. Test cricket relies upon batsmen scoring buckets of runs and not getting out whereas Twenty20 cricket relies upon scoring buckets of runs much quicker and hitting boundaries much more frequently.

Cricket is need of an Oakland-esque revolution. It is time for an update and Twenty20 cricket is the perfect launching pad for moving past the traditional and medieval methods of the past which spread lies about player performances to those observing.

That is the aim of this website: to weed out misleading statistics and guide you towards more in-depth assessments of cricket statistics.