A School of Emergent Priorities poster re-derives a district cricket association's club grading ladder under 1,152 defensible sets of scorer conventions, and finds the published ladder is neither the only one the season supports nor the most common.
Re-deriving a season of hand-scored innings under every defensible scorer convention moves seven of ten clubs into a promotion place
There are 1,152 defensible ways to add up a season of suburban cricket. A district association published one of them, and promoted two clubs on it.
Ranked Under One Convention, deposited today through the Office of Research Outputs, transcribes 4,186 batting innings from a full season of returned paper scorebooks — 118 matches, 22 volunteer scorers, ten clubs — and re-derives the association’s club grading ladder under every combination of six scoring conventions the rule book leaves open: how a not-out is treated, what becomes of a did-not-bat row, how retirements are classed, where the qualification threshold sits, whether abandoned matches count, and who is credited with a run-out.
Across the resulting 1,152 ladders, the club promoted in second place holds a promotion position in 41.3 per cent of them. A club that was not promoted holds one in 33.8 per cent. Seven of the ten clubs occupy a promotion place under at least one defensible specification, and 31 of 44 representative-squad selections change under at least half the space.
Nothing here is a criticism of the people keeping the books. They are doing something the association never wrote down how to do, and doing it consistently from one Saturday to the next. The variation is between one scorer’s settled habit and the next one’s.
— Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer in the School, observes that “a convention only looks arbitrary once somebody has counted how many others would have served just as well”.
The University holds that work of this kind — patient, unglamorous, and addressed to a decision somebody actually has to make — is characteristic of what its schools are for.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.9d8yvs.