🏏 Yashasvi Jaiswal's success for India points to two of cricket's most interesting trends

My Week in Sport(s): the impact of handedness on batting, Victor Wembanyama's growth and Rose Zhang

Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.

In this edition:

• 🏏 The success of left-handed openers - and India’s relative lack of them

• 🏀 Victor Wembanyama, quick learner

• ⛳️ Rose Zhang, elite ball-striker

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🏏 Yashasvi Jaiswal's success for India points to two of cricket's most interesting trends

Some natural sporting advantages are obvious.

In this newsletter last year, we covered Victor Wembanyama before the start of his NBA career — and it doesn’t get more straightforward than the physical advantage he has, standing at 7ft 4in, over everyone else in the league.

Others are more subtle, but still well established and understood by the watching public — like the concept of ‘platoon splits’ in baseball:

“[T]here is a long history of research and observation indicating that most hitters do better against pitchers of the opposite hand (LHH vs RHP and RHH vs LHP) than against pitchers of the same hand (LHH vs LHP and RHH vs RHP). The inverse is true for pitchers.”

Interestingly, there’s a similar phenomenon evident in the test cricket record that is very real — but nowhere near as widely discussed by the sport’s general audience.

Nathan Leamon — a Senior Data Scientist at the England & Wales Cricket Board, and co-founder of cricket data company CricViz — devoted a whole chapter of his book Hitting Against The Spin, co-authored by CricViz’s current Head of Insight Ben Jones, to it.

But followers of men’s test cricket might be a bit surprised to hear — given one of the current major storylines in the game — that the chapter is titled: ‘Why Don’t Indians Bat Left-Handed?’

In the ongoing series between India and England, it’s been hard to ignore the performances of Yashasvi Jaiswal.

He has scored almost twice as many runs as any other batter in the series so far — and has been performing at a much higher level than any other opener in world cricket since his debut in the Caribbean last summer.

Using a version of the ‘runs vs. expectation per dismissal’ metric I laid out last year, we can compare Jaiswal to the other openers who have batted in the test matches he has played in — and see that he has outperformed them by a distance.

Overall, he’s scoring about 30 more runs per dismissal than the other opening batters in his games — by far the best figure of any opener who’s played as many innings as he has since the last World Test Championship cycle began in August 2021.

Jaiswal, of course, bats left-handed. The second-best opening batter by this metric over this period — Australia’s Usman Khawaja — does so too.

And this doesn’t appear to be an incidental detail: left-handed batters who open the innings in men’s test matches consistently perform better than right-handers do.

Since 2000, left-handed openers have scored 38 runs per dismissal on average, and been dismissed every 75 balls; right-handers have scored 33 on average and been dismissed every 68 balls over the same period.

Whether it’s conscious or not, teams’ selection decisions reflect this disparity: in the 21st century, left-handed opening batters have been given considerably more opportunities in men’s tests than right-handed ones.

But India’s approach really is an outlier among cricket’s elite: they give considerably fewer opportunities at the top of the order to left-handed batters.

56% of all test innings by openers in this period have been played by left-handers — but only 25% of India’s.

Another way to look at this is that — despite having played only eight career matches — Jaiswal has already scored the fifth most runs in men’s tests of any left-handed Indian opener¹.

To understand why this gap exists between India and other countries, we need to go first to Jones and Leamon’s general explanation for the wider global phenomenon.

As the authors show, the advantage for left-hand batters in men’s tests is one which exists only in the initial period of each innings. They score around 5 more runs per dismissal on average than right-handers do during the first 30 overs, but from that point onwards there is no discernible difference in outcomes².

In most of the world, this is a period of the game dominated by seam bowling — and right-arm seamers tend to attack left-handed batters from a side of the crease which makes one of the primary forms of dismissal (leg before wicket) much less likely to occur under the sport’s rules³.

This isn’t the case in India, though.

There, much more spin is bowled inside the first 30 overs of test innings — and that’s a match-up which is much more favourable to right-handed batters⁴.

As Jones and Leamon explain, batting against spin is most difficult when the ball is deviating off the surface away from the batter’s body — and that is a situation which left-handers face much more frequently in test matches than right-handers.

You only have to look at Jaiswal’s own dismissal by part-time off-spinner Joe Root in the last innings of the fourth test against England in Ranchi — attempting to drive a ball through the off-side on a turning pitch — for a recent example of this.

Bowling more spin inside the first 30 overs might be one plausible method for slowing down top left-handed openers⁵ in general — but, despite that last dismissal, I’m not sure even that will work often enough against Jaiswal.

As Jarrod Kimber and colleagues have pointed out repeatedly at Good Areas⁶ during this series, the young Indian appears to be a truly exceptional player of spin bowling⁷.

As Leamon and Jones laid out in their book, left-hand openers have a natural advantage over their right-handed peers against seamers — but tend to cede that back when facing slower bowling.

It’s not clear that’s true in Yashasvi Jaiswal’s case, though. If he continues to pair a solid record against pace bowling with complete dominance of spin, we could be witnessing the start of a very special career — and one without precedent in the history of Indian cricket.

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🏀 Run the Numbers

There’s been plenty of thorough coverage of Victor Wembanyama’s rapid improvement within his first NBA season elsewhere; I’ve recommended the analysis of Ben Taylor of Thinking Basketball before in this newsletter, and he does an excellent job of breaking down the rookie’s game in a recent video on his YouTube channel.

In summary, though: after a slow start on the offensive end — not helped by the San Antonio Spurs’ initial insistence on pairing him with another big man — he’s now basically a top-20 player in the league, at least according to Basketball Reference’s Box Plus-Minus metric⁸.

His defensive game has been as cartoonishly effective as it was projected to be — and jump shooting remains his most important ‘swing skill’ on the other side of the ball.

But my favourite part of his game to watch so far has been his passing: he uses his length and reach in innovative ways to thread the ball around opponents and into the path of teammates in advantageous positions.

And this has improved as the season has gone on, too. According to Cleaning the Glass, he has assisted 23% of the baskets scored by his teammates while he’s been on the court in the 26 games he’s played since the start of this calendar year — up from a rate of 16% in the 27 he played in during 2023.

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⛳️ Watch the Games

In this section last week we discussed Sabrina Ionescu, who recently went head to head with Steph Curry in a three-point shootout during the NBA’s All Star weekend.

This week, it was the turn of some of the biggest names in men’s and women’s golf to compete alongside one another — as Rose Zhang, Lexi Thompson, Rory McIlroy and Max Homa took part in the latest edition of TNT’s ‘The Match’.

Zhang is one of the most exciting prospects on the LPGA Tour, and won in her first start after turning professional last season.

And her current strengths and weaknesses map quite neatly onto the profile we’ve identified in the games of players like McIlroy in the past: elite from tee to green, but comparatively weaker with putter in hand⁹.

I love watching McIlroy draw the ball — and Zhang often produces the same shot shape with what Golf Digest described last year as “the sweetest swing in golf”.

There was a pleasing example of this part of her game during The Match on Monday.

At the par-four 7th hole, Zhang sent her iron-shot approach high into the night sky from the middle of the fairway, with a gentle curve from right to left.

The ball’s spin had arrested its forward momentum by the third bounce, and it began its slow roll back towards the hole to leave her with a very makeable putt for birdie — which the 20-year-old duly converted.

You can watch a clip of this sequence here.

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The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published in two weeks, on Saturday March 16.

1. In contrast, 17 right-handed batters have scored more career runs while opening for India.

2. Jones and Leamon: “we see a marked advantage to left-handers in the new-ball period that then completely disappears for the remainder of the innings” (p.123).

3. Jones and Leamon: “over 80 per cent of fast bowlers are right-armers” (p.120); “48% of their deliveries [from over the wicket] that would hit a left-hander’s stumps pitch outside leg stump and therefore cannot result in LBW” (p.119).

4. Jones and Leamon: “in India…45% of new-ball wickets this century have fallen to spin” (p.125).

5. Here’s something to look out for when the Indian selectors eventually pick a replacement for Jaiswal’s opening partner Rohit Sharma (who turns 37 in April). They tend to pretty consistently signpost who is next in line for the test side via their selections for the second-string ‘India A’ team — and it’s notable that, in their recent series against England’s equivalent, two of the three openers selected were left-handers: Sai Sudharsan and Devdutt Padikkal. Could India soon have two at the top of the order?

6. Coincidentally, Kimber also mentioned Jones and Leamon’s book in a post at Good Areas yesterday.

7. This chart, from February 3, shows that — at that point in time — his average against spin in tests was much higher than his average against pace.

8. At a BPM of +4.2 points per 100 possessions, he’s technically ranked 22nd (after the Spurs’ win on Thursday night).

9. Zhang ranked 6th on the LPGA Tour in Strokes Gained Tee to Green last season among players who played at least 30% of possible rounds — but only 71st in Strokes Gained Putting.