Back at the beginning of the summer, I was listening to ABC radio coverage of the first test between Australia and the West Indies. Aside from the surreal and absolutely perfect sensation of hearing cricket on the radio that hit the same spot as baseball in the same medium, they began at one point lamenting the state of cricket stats, comparing them negatively to baseball. While I found it odd that a cricket booth talked that much about baseball when the reverse would make most baseball fans and players throw a hissy fit, that thought stuck with me throughout my MLC viewing experience in 2025.
MLC’s TV broadcast has a ton of detailed analysis: stuff like pace/spin splits for and the now-pervasive wagon wheel shot distribution for batters, ball tracking detailing line and length spreads for bowlers and the runs scored off each, and, sometimes, actual fielding stats that prove commentators are full of it when every single player is “usually so reliable” before they put down a catch that I, an unathletic 30-something whose greatest exposure to actual cricket is using a Kookaburra County Star as a fidget, would feel confident about taking. All of that is great data visualization that has become synonymous with franchise cricket on TV in particular but all forms of the game in general.
But once the TV broadcast is over, where does it go?
From a fan’s perspective, once that stuff is gone, it’s gone. Why can’t I go look that stuff up later? Why can’t I see all the intricate details of Rushil Ugarkar’s epic title-clinching 20th over at Grand Prairie, or the sweet spot rate of Finn Allen’s world record-setting innings in Oakland? MLC’s website lists some limited stats with basic filters that don’t really offer much for nerds like me to sink our teeth into. Instead, if we want to analyze a game later, we get written commentary like, “he edged a humble snorter to the slips, where Sourav Ganguly dived to his right to pick up a low snatch!”
Riveting. And I totally understood it.
To the point of the ABC crew, and in contrast to cricket anywhere in the world, Major League Baseball created an entire cottage industry out of data analysis and visualization with statistics to match. It is its own way to watch and understand baseball now, a completely new way to study and understand the game that doesn’t even need one to so much as pick up a bat. That data is readily available at Baseball Savant, which is the most detailed statistical analysis of any athletes anywhere on Earth.
All of this has zero paywalls or subscriptions attached - no emails, no strings, just the sweet, sweet crunch of enough hard data that a veteran Pathfinder player would break into a sweat just looking at it. None of it is proprietary; it’s just too elaborate to replicate and too accurate to need or want to. It’s also the exact same data that TV broadcasts will use in terms of ball tracking, pitch locations, movement, bat speed, exit velocity, and so on. If anything, the stuff on Baseball Savant is more sophisticated than most MLB TV broadcasts.
MLC has exit velo and launch angles on sixes and access to the same ball tracking technology as any other high-level cricket in the world, all of which can create informative, if somewhat limited displays to help tell the story of games. Comparable data for cricket already exists to create what MLB has had, but it hasn’t been compiled into anything like Baseball Savant. CricViz does great work, but all of it is proprietary. ESPNCricinfo dabbles in data visualization, but what’s displayed is pretty ho-hum and limited to the top two batters and bowlers for individual games as opposed to any player from any game.
Advanced stats and data visualization is at best a partially-explored medium in cricket. In a sport as opaque as cricket can be to new fans, its data viz matches that energy. Not even the IPL presents data on MLB’s level for fan consumption online in any permanent format; the most it has is some basic head-to-head stats between individual players (which is cool! but also very limited). There are so many tech and tech-adjacent people in MLC’s ownership group ranging from successful VCs to the current CEO of Microsoft. The brains and tools are there to shape and execute this, and it presents a chance for MLC to be on the cutting-edge of cricket presentation and conversation. It’s the kind of thing that will make other boards and franchise owners sit up and say, “Do you see what they’re doing in America?”
The principal reason to do this, though, is accessibility. What’s the best way to get people hooked on a sport they didn’t grow up with? Let them see it on their own terms, from as many different angles and viewpoints as possible. Getting people to watch the game is one thing, but arming them with a wide array of tools to understand what they watch makes it more likely they’ll be able to understand why certain things happen(ed), why certain players thrive in certain situations, what makes a bowler of each discipline so good (or not) and how matchups and conditions can help or hamper what they do. It gets people over that first hurdle of knowledge into the game. For now, new folks have to rely on a lower third TV graphic showing Nicholas Pooran’s pace/spin splits that’s on screen for less than 10 seconds and gone forever but explains why Seattle never bowled Harmeet Singh against New York at all on June 26 - something that bore out when the Orcas won, though that’s not the reason they won the game (or the one after that, or the one after that).
Franchise cricket doesn’t have to be about furniture-based flexing or poorly-timed branding (but I guess Barbados Republicans didn’t have the same ring to it). It has already changed so much about the sport, and this era of cricket as a true worldwide sport that is less than a decade old needs someone to spearhead the conversation in a direction that looks more like what we know here in the US. That’s done by putting high-quality data in the hands of the fans, especially when it’s something the teams and broadcasters already have.
Someone just has to say the five magic words: make it so, Mr. Data.
Thanks for reading Stumps & Stripes! This project has been so much fun to put together, and I’m really enjoying what has come out of it and the word of mouth/self-promotion that has spread across Reddit and Discord within the cricket niche. Speaking of niche, MLC has tossed around in public the idea of spinning up a women’s pro T20 competition. Getting it started will be easy, but getting it right will not.
If you’re enjoying my work, I ask you to consider a free email subscription. I do this for the love of the game, so I have no plans to ever make subscriptions anything other than free, though I did, for fun, take a look at prices on stickers. More American cricket content is coming this Friday. Stay tuned!