Today, we present a new method for ranking Cricket players. Or rather, we should say we are presenting a new experiment in ranking players. In our previous blog post, we had presented a new way of ranking teams based on the pairwise win-loss record of the teams. We wanted to extend this idea to ranking players, but then we were unable to come up with how to define a corresponding “win-loss” record for a given pair of players.
Instead of us trying to figure out arcane mathematical ways of deciding which player among a given pair is the better of the two, we decided to use the wisdom of the crowds. We want you to help us rank the players. And the way you can help us rank the players is very different from the traditional polls that is taken to generate player rankings. We are not going to ask you to “rate” different players on a scale of 1 to 10. Neither are we going to give you a big list of players and ask you to assign ranks to the individual players. Instead, we have a very simple setup to get your input to help us rank players.
On the fan rankings page, you will be presented a random pair of batsmen or a random pair of bowlers. For each pair, you only have to vote for which of the two players is the better one in your opinion. To assist you in voting, we give a side-by-side comparison of the 2011-2012 ODI statistics of the two players. You are free to ignore this information when voting. Or, if you haven’t heard of one (or both!) the players, you can click on the link for the individual player statistics to know more about the player(s). You are free to cast your vote for just one pair, or for a hundred pairs. It is totally up to you as to how many votes you want to cast (though of course, we would like you to cast as many votes as you can!)
Once we have sufficient voting data, we will generate the player rankings using the same method as we employed for generating the team rankings. However, because we have many more players (at least 300), we need a lot of data to generate a meaningful rankings of the players. We hope that your participation will make this experiment a grand success!