The sheer thrill of a six has remained undiminished. Sure, there’s a separate fanbase for an inswinging yorker breaching through the batter’s defences before hitting the stumps. But, geez, the six. Pure theatre whether it’s book cricket, inside the confines of your bedroom, gully cricket or at the elite level in front of 50,000 people. It’s the ultimate expression of hedonism with a bat. A batter’s wet dream.
In this year’s Indian Premier League (IPL), that dream has played itself on an endless loop. After the 18th match — aptly decided by a straight six by Nitish Kumar Reddy — 326 maximums have been struck. You extrapolate that figure across the 74 games and you get 1332 sixes, 208 better than the previous best of 1124 in 2023 which also had the same number of matches.
This isn’t just to say that the league is witnessing more number of sixes than before. In fact, as soon as the league expanded to 10 teams, it was a given. But it’s that the league is seeing sixes being hit at an unprecedented (perhaps even unsustainable) rate.
The numbers back this. In the league’s inaugural edition in 2008, teams, on average, hit one six every 3.3 overs (20.95 balls to be exact). This figure has gone up (it was once every 2.4 overs in 2018) or gone down (3.2 overs in 2021).
Over the last three years, though, six-hitting has been weaponized on an industrial scale. In 2024, it has never been better. Teams are hitting one six every 12.9 deliveries. It’s an improvement of 2.3 balls over the previous best of 15.3 in 2023.
Six-hitting’s own Anthropocene may be here.
Basketball and football (arguably two of the most popular team sports across the planet) had an awakening a few years ago. In the former, teams figured out that it would make sense to attempt more three-pointers. It’s now called the ‘3-point revolution’.
In the latter, a new metric — xG (Expected Goals) — came into the limelight 3-4 years ago. It’s now one of the most critical data points in the sport (it is basically a metric that’s tailored to inform how many goals a team would have normally scored over a match after taking into account the quality of chances they had).
Similarly, T20s also underwent a silent data revolution. Teams that hit more boundaries across 20 overs generally win. Even across boundaries, there is a split. Six-hitting teams tend to win more games.
Sankar Rajgopal, who used to work as a R&D Consultant and Analyst at Punjab Kings explains. “There was a data point in basketball where three-pointers were leading to more wins than two-pointers,” Rajgopal, who now works as Creative Director at Viacom18 Media, said. “Cause and effect. That data point change happened in cricket a few years ago when analysts figured that more boundaries meant you were winning more matches.”
When the shortest format first caught fire one-and-a-half decades ago, six-hitting as art was still in its infancy. Theories such as dot-ball minimisation were still the way to go. In 2024, all the available evidence points towards the primacy of boundary-hitting as the sport’s greatest currency.
Rajgopal illustrated this. “Data now suggests that 80% of the matches are won by teams scoring more boundaries. Dot ball minimisations was about 30%.”
Dan Weston, an analyst who worked with the Punjab team in the 2022 mega-auctions in, is even more intimate. “I remember when I went on to the 2022 mega auctions, it was hard to find batters who played with a high tempo,” he said. “You can see why a player like Manish Pandey has gone to so many teams because people kind of realise that maybe his style of players aren’t really what they look for. But they have had to go down that road a little because of a lack of availability. They had no real choice (that’s why they kept going back to players with a skill set that matched Manish's). I found that it was a major problem.”
That no longer seems to be the case. Out of all the batters who have hit a minimum of five sixes so far in this edition, four are uncapped Indian batters (Abhishek Sharma, Riyan Parag, Shashank Singh and Prabhsimran Singh). Abhishek, in fact, is the leading Indian six-hitter with 15. The next best is Parag with 12. Eighteen matches may be a small sample size but the first trends cannot be ignored. Out of the 25 leading six-hitters in the whole of last season, only one was an uncapped Indian batter; that number stands at four this season.
You can make the argument that all of the above-mentioned batters have played in the IPL before. But they seem to have levelled up. Weston, who works with Kent as well as Birmingham Phoenix in The Hundred, is cognizant of this. “Over the last year or two, we have seen the emergence of players like Yashasvi Jaiswal, Jitesh (Sharma), Abhishek, Prabhsimran Singh, Rinku Singh and Tilak Varma. This year, we have seen the impact immediately from (Angkrish) Raghuvanshi, Riyan Parag and so on. All of them play a very high-intent style of cricket. It can only be good for the league as it makes it more attractive to watch as well as the international team.”
Finding domestic players is just one part of the puzzle. Getting them to marry intent with execution is the other challenge. How have the likes of Abhishek managed it? Julian Wood, who wrote the grammar of power-hitting, has a theory. “The IPL creates an environment where these young players are playing alongside the best hitters of a cricket ball on the planet,” Wood, who has taught power-hitting to several T20 specialists, said. “They are tapping into what they do and adapting it to their own game. To me, batting/hitting in T20 cricket is the fastest evolving part of any sport.”
The ever-evolving aspect includes prioritising six-hitting and coming around to the argument that three sixes are better than four fours. Here’s Weston: “This year, Kolkata have so far hit an almost equal number of fours and sixes (45 sixes and 44 fours). So we are starting to see the combination of the additional depth that the impact player provides to domestic players coming in. Teams are realising that the extra depth allows them to play more attacking cricket and that includes a higher percentage of aerial shots as well.” That’s the other thing that’s jumped this year. In 2023, the fours to six ratio stood at 1.93:1. The average from 2019 to 2023 had been 2.06. In 2024, this number stands at under 1.55. That means for every 155 fours, teams are scoring 100 sixes. Weston attributed that to players getting more comfortable going aerial.
Jatin Paranjpe, former Indian cricketer and one-time member of the selection committee, believes that ‘sixes are the new fours’. “It’s simple,” he said. “Power-hitting is the focus of the batters these days. That equals more sixes as power hitting is about distance.”
Is this rate of six-hitting sustainable? An analyst at one of the teams isn’t too sure. “Pitches have been flat (this year). While batters keep practising six-hitting, some of the bowlers may be on workload management. In some places, the pitches have been re-laid. You have to keep all of these factors into consideration.”
Will there be a regression to the mean over the next few weeks or is this the start of another evolution? The next one-and-a-half months will provide all the answers.
(All numbers in the copy are until CSK vs SRH on Friday).