IPL Retentions - Part 1

Value, value, value - nothing else is important

“There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening. This leads people who run major league baseball teams to misjudge their players and mismanage their teams.”

“People who run ball clubs think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players, your goal should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs.”

“The Boston Redsocks see Johnny Damon as a superstar who’s worth $7.5m a year. When I see Johnny Damon, what I see is an imperfect understanding of where runs come from. Is he worth the $7.5m a year that the Boston Redsocks pay him? No, no, baseball thinking is medieval - they’re asking all the wrong questions”

**Many thanks to supporters who have bought me a coffee. It is much appreciated!**

For anyone who hasn’t seen the film Moneyball, these are quotes from Jonah Hill’s character - the analyst - to Billy Beane in the car park before he was hired to work at Oakland Athletics, and I noted these down a couple of days back after watching the film for what must be about the 10th time. The reason why I think they’re particularly relevant? Let’s look at each one in a cricket context, with edits in capitals…

“There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening. This leads people who run CRICKET teams to misjudge their players and mismanage their teams.” We know this happens, I talked about it a lot recently in the November Mailbag, and many, many times in the past. The mistakes teams make are predictable and easily avoidable, but teams continually misjudge players and mismanage their teams.

“People who run CRICKET clubs think in terms of buying players. THE SAME APPLIES FOR CRICKET AS IN BASEBALL, your goal shouldn’t be to buy players, your goal should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs (WHICH TO A MAJOR EXTENT IS SIMPLY BOUNDARY HITTING WITH THE BAT AND BOUNDARY PREVENTION WITH THE BALL).”

“ROYAL CHALLENGERS BANGALORE see VIRAT KOHLI as a superstar who’s worth 17 CRORE a year. When I see VIRAT KOHLI, what I see is an imperfect understanding of where runs come from. Is he worth the 17 CRORE a year that ROYAL CHALLENGERS BANGALORE pay him? No, no, CRICKET thinking is medieval - they’re asking all the wrong questions”

This probably isn’t the start that you envisaged to me writing about the current IPL retentions in this series of articles ahead of the Mega Auction but in my view, it’s actually really important to make these points because it starts to open up the debate about the criteria with which to assess whether a player should or should not be retained.

It is my firm belief that the IPL auction marketplace is extremely inefficient. Emotion, bias, flawed groupthink and bravado frequently appear to trump both logic and viewing a player simply as a commodity, which in truth is basically what they are when presented at the auction. It’s a fantastic spectacle but one which frequently defies any analytical rationale.

Prior to this year’s upcoming major auction, the existing IPL teams were allowed to retain up to four players from their current squads, at pre-determined price points. The rules are pretty complex and it would take me ages to explain them here, so just check out this article on Cricinfo if you want to understand more. Just as a quick ballpark guide, 1 Crore is about £100,000 while 1 Lakh is about £1,000.

As I alluded to in the edited quotes from Moneyball, a team’s primary objective - whether via retentions or in the open marketplace at auction - should be to find undervalued players in what is a pretty inefficient marketplace. This might be a high value, high price tag player who might cost 10 Crore but is a world-class player offering a scarce skillset (e.g. you value that player at 16 Crore but pay 10 Crore) but could also be a player who you think can add value to your squad but would otherwise go unsold and you can then pick them up for 50 lakh (the extremely cheap base price - around £50,000 for the entire tournament - for many overseas players).

To do that, you need to be buying runs, or to be a little more specific, buying runs at a value cost - this could be created runs above average for a batter, or saved runs below average for a bowler - but the purpose is basically the same. We know that over the last few years, around 85% of teams in the IPL win the match when they hit a higher boundary percentage than the opposition (far higher than the win percentage for facing fewer dot balls than the opposition) so essentially you aren’t just buying runs, you’re buying boundaries - as I made the point about previously. This is why boundary percentage (for batters, just like boundary conceded percentage is for bowlers), relative to the stages in which a player is involved in the match, is such a vital metric when assessing a player’s ability - yet this is frequently ignored at auction.

Some readers might be saying something along the lines of ‘well, you said that Virat Kohli isn’t worth 17 Crore but he scores a lot of runs, so you don’t know what you’re talking about’. Unfortunately, this is a very first-level argument. Kohli, for example, has scored 891 runs in the last two IPLs, which of course is a pretty decent figure - this gives him an average just below 35 - but he’s taken 723 balls to score those runs, meaning that he strikes at 120.47 per 100 balls. Essentially, based on this, he has scored a ballpark average innings of 35 from 29 balls across those two seasons, so he takes around 1/4 of the RCB batting resources from those average 29 balls faced. Extrapolate that over a 120 ball innings and RCB would score just 144.83 runs per innings plus extras.

The real question here is not whether Kohli scores runs - we know he does, and we know he has a high batting average - but whether RCB would be better served by a player scoring them at a higher strike rate, or perhaps more relevantly, whether several players could cover this task more efficiently. For example, if Kohli faces 1/4 of RCB’s balls available to bat, then it could potentially have had a negative impact on the number of balls which Glenn Maxwell and AB De Villiers might have been able to face last season - and these are typically higher strike rate batters.

Furthermore, I’ve discussed on numerous occasions how there is a direct relationship between strike rate and boundary percentage for batters. It’s not far from impossible to strike at 140+ over a large sample size when hitting below 16% boundaries (which is the ballpark average boundary percentage for most leagues). Kohli’s boundary percentage in the 2020 IPL was 8.86% (the lowest for any batter facing 200+ balls in the tournament) and in the recent 2021 edition, was 15.33% - a better figure but still below average.

So, I ask you this - given that we know that around 85% of matches are won by the team with the higher boundary percentage, how does paying roughly 20% of a team’s budget on a player who isn’t particularly likely to positively contribute to winning the boundary count on a regular basis make any sense? This neatly brings me back to the original quote earlier in this article - ‘When I see VIRAT KOHLI, what I see is an imperfect understanding of where runs come from. Is he worth the 17 CRORE a year that ROYAL CHALLENGERS BANGALORE pay him? No, no, CRICKET thinking is medieval - they’re asking all the wrong questions’

Again, if there are still some readers who disagree with my approach, they might say ‘well Kohli adds huge commercial value to a franchise so he actually presents value even at a higher cost’. But I want to make things clear - cricket is not like football with regards to commercial value. In cricket, commercial value doesn’t help you build a better team because there’s still a level budget cap regardless of how much commercial value a team can generate.

A cricket team in most franchise tournaments cannot reinvest their commercial income into improving their team. In football, they can. If, in a hypothetical world, Virat Kohli helps sell an additional one million RCB jerseys, the only people who benefit are the owners - the money generated from these jersey sales cannot give RCB a higher budget at auction. If Cristiano Ronaldo helps sell an additional one million Manchester United jerseys, in theory, that money can be reinvested into the playing squad and it should give Manchester United a higher FFP ceiling as well, so their chances of winning can theoretically increase because of that increased commercial value.

So, let’s forget about commercial possibilities when determining a cricketer’s value, because it has absolutely zero consequence on a team’s chances of winning matches and tournaments. I get many comments on social media saying ‘what about commercial value’ or words to that effect but it’s an absolute irrelevance when determining whether a player is good or bad value in terms of helping a team’s expected win percentage or expected points per game figure.

To finish, I want to move back to the auction dynamics and retentions in particular. It sounds like an extremely basic rule and it basically is - but I know many examples of teams breaking this rule in previous auctions and indeed, more examples in the current list of retentions as well. The rule, as I say, is basic, and it is as follows:-

‘Only retain a player if you perceive that there is a high chance that the player in question will cost significantly more in the open market at auction’.

This is an area which Mumbai Indians in particular have done well in recent mini auctions - they keep a strong domestic core each year because they know their good domestic players will cost more to buy back at auction due to the low supply of high-quality domestic players at mini auction, and let many of their overseas players go back into the mini auction (sometimes buying them back) because there’s an over-supply of decent overseas players, many of whom eventually end up going unsold.

Adhering to this rule requires letting your head rule your heart, because emotional ties (plus similar stuff like the sunk cost fallacy) are very prevalent in cricket. It all goes back to valuing a player more as a commodity. Sure, there’s some instances where a player’s cost for retention might be, say, 10 Crore and you might calculate that you’d be likely to buy them back at auction for 9 Crore and the 1 Crore saving isn’t enough to warrant taking the risk in paying more plus risking making the player unhappy by messing them around, but there’s many examples of teams dramatically overpaying for retentions or to buy back players at auction who previously played for them - there’s a great example of this on the Netflix documentary ‘Cricket Fever’, featuring Mumbai Indians and Krunal Pandya. It should almost go without saying that if rival teams know that a certain team has an emotional tie to a particular player, that team can be hugely exploited at auction by making them hugely overpay to bring them back into their squad.

There’s at least one example of teams overpaying for a retention in the current list of retentions, and in part two which I’ll publish tomorrow (1st December), I’ll run through my analysis, including data/charts on four of the teams retentions. Part three, which I’m anticipating to be available on Thursday (2nd December) will cover the remaining four teams.

**Many thanks to supporters who have bought me a coffee. It is much appreciated!**