When my father mentioned that Virat Kohli scored a century (again) against South Africa, I wondered how he compared to the likes of Tendulkar and Gavaskar.
I asked ChatGPT:
If you had to evaluate the quality of Indian batsmen over time, what single metric (possibly composite) would you use?
Evaluate the top Indian batsmen in history on this metric. Plot them over their active years (X-axis) along with the metric (Y-axis), labelled with the player names, on a beautiful visualization.
It picked a simple metric: Batting Average * log(Total Runs).
Claude and Gemini, too, preferred simple metrics that favored the batting average or total runs. Strike rate, relative to era, win rate impact, etc. were all excluded.
(Sadly, any metric that misses Kapil Dev feels a bit… incomplete.)
Data story: https://sanand0.github.io/datastories/indian-batting-greats/
