ABOUT HEAVY BAIL STATISTICS

Although I only started Heavy Bail Statistics in June 2019, its roots can be traced back to the summer of 2014, when I was a Statistics student in Cardiff working on my Masters dissertation. Having been given an almost unsettling amount of freedom in what to do it on, I decided to stick what I know best, and focus on statistics in test match cricket. After uncovering a few excellent data sources - cricsheet.org in particular was a revelation - I set out to create a new team ranking system, a player ranking system, and a match predictor tool.

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The project was a success, and has since been re-purposed into an academic paper by my old tutor, but until recently I had largely moved on from it. However, during the Cricket World Cup in 2019, I was inspired to dig out my old code - which took a while since it was on a broken laptop at the bottom of a wardrobe in my parents' house - to see how it would rate the players. As I was going through it, my mind was flooded with more ideas for analysis, which eventually led to the idea for Heavy Bail Statistics.

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The initial focus for Heavy Bail will be to apply the models I developed in 2014 to modern day cricket. We have an alternative world ranking system that aims to address some of the shortcomings of the official system used by the ICC, and we also have a our own individual player rankings. There are no particular guidelines to the content on Heavy Bail, but plans for the future generally focus on how statistical techniques such as regression and classification can be applied to the wealth of cricket data out there.

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And, who knows, maybe we'll find something interesting along the way...

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