Best Batsman in IPL!

In the recent past there have been way too many parameters of judging the best batsman in IPL so far. Newspapers and magazines have used the number of runs scored and the strike rate as the major factors indicating the success of a batsman (and rightly so).

Here is a consolidated Ranking of the top batsmen in IPL so far.


Surprises
To me the 2 major surprises are Ross Taylor at Rank 16 and Venugopal Rao at Rank 20.
However a look at their performances shows that Ross Taylor has an average of 37.25 along with the 3rd highest Strike Rate of 183.95, while Venugopal Rao has an average of 42.8 with a SR of 145.57. Bottom of the Table
Of the 50 batsmen who have scored 100/more runs so far, the last 5 are


Process of Arriving at the ranking:

The basic criterion for arriving at the consolidated ranking are total runs scored, average and strike rate. Here are the individual rankings in each of these.

Total Runs Scored

Average

Strike Rate

By taking into consideration the all the 3 parameters, the overall ranking emerges. The major challenge in arriving at a consolidated ranking of this sort is that, the players who have played only 3-4 matches may have a very high strike rate/average which would be extremely hard to maintain in the long run (like Luke Pomersbach's average of infinity).

Thus all the 3 parameters are taken into consideration with a lower weightage to Strike Rate as compared to Total Runs Scored and Average.

Ranking - Runs, Average & SR

If the average is calculated by not considering the not outs, i.e. the average score a batsman scores when he comes out to bat. However, the ranking tends to favour the opening batsmen even more.

Ranking - Runs, Average per Inning & SR

And finally, combined ranking by factoring in both the parameters (along with Total Runs scored and SR) is the best means to arrive at a fair ranking of the batsmen.

Overall Ranking

Challenges
It is a tricky thing to arrive at a best batsmen ranking because each batsman has a different role to play in the team. The openers usually have time to play themselves in and have the luxury of the field restrictions to them in addition to the fact that they have the full quota of over to play (if they can that is). Its hardly a surprise then to see that the top 4 run getters as of now, are openers.

The middle order batsmen on the other hand, usually don't have all the time in the world, but they can end up 'not out' at the end of the innings which helps their average considerably.

Another factor is the fact that some teams are playing on grounds which are low scoring than the others. KKR for instance plays half its matches in Eden Gardens which has proved to be a low scoring venue and thus the batsmen may stand to lose out on high scores and thus a high rank.