A strike rate with no over number attached is a rumour

Scoring at a hundred and forty in the last four overs and doing it in the eighth are different achievements sold under one number.

Two batters end the season at a hundred and thirty-five. One of them came in at the fall of the fourth wicket in the sixteenth over, every time, against death bowling and a spread field. The other opened. They are not the same player and the number cannot tell them apart.

This is the basic failure of strike rate as it is usually published. It averages rates across situations that have wildly different difficulty and wildly different value. Runs in the eighth over come against a bowler who is trying not to concede, with fielders in the ring, off a ball that is still hard. Runs in the nineteenth come against a specialist with a wet ball, five men on the rope and a field designed to make every scoring shot risky. The second is much harder. It is also worth more, because there are fewer balls left in which a mistake can be repaired.

An honest version of the metric would index each ball against what an average batter scores off that ball, in that phase, against that bowling type, at that ground. Then a strike rate becomes a comparison rather than a description. Some analysts do this privately. Broadcast graphics do not, because the honest version has no headline number and the dishonest one fits on a lower third.

There is a second problem which annoys me more, and it is the denominator. Strike rate treats every ball faced as equal, so a batter who refuses the single on the fifth ball of an over, keeps the strike, and then hits the sixth for four is rewarded twice. Once for the four and once for the dots he chose. Strike rotation barely registers anywhere, and it is the most reliable difference between a middle order that chases well and one that does not.

The counterargument is that career numbers wash all this out over enough innings. They do not. Batting orders are stable. A player who bats at five for four years accumulates four years of five's situations, and comparing him to an opener is comparing two different jobs that happen to share a unit.

Put the phase on the graphic. It is one extra line of text and it would end most of the arguments people have about this on the internet.