The Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise Rajasthan Royals is known for its street smart approach in player auctions. Their think-tank doesn’t often go for marquee buys, instead they opt for a data-driven approach to pick horses for courses option at a right price – a method that is described by the term “Moneyball” (inspired by an American biographical sports drama film directed by Bennett Miller) in the sports fraternity.
In a recent interaction on social media Rahul Dravid – the former India and Rajasthan Royals skipper revealed that the “Moneyball” approach helped the team immensely during his tenure with the franchise as a player cum mentor.
Following his association with Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) in the first three editions of IPL, Dravid moved to the Rajasthan Royals in 2011 and since he came on board, the Royals put a lot of emphasis on data analysis before picking any player in the auction.
Nevertheless, in 2011 and 2012, the Royals did not get the desired results as they finished sixth and seventh respectively in the league table, but in the following season, the team locked a Champions League berth by finishing third in the IPL. And One of the more impactful players who was delivering for the franchise was Australia’s Brad Hodge.
“After RCB, I moved on to RR and I got into more of a captain-coach-management role and we were looking through a lot of data and stats. At RR, we were literally a Moneyball team. We had to compete with the top teams with 40-60 percent of the budget. It’s not easy in an environment where everyone has a lot of data and knowledge,” Dravid said on the Insights vs Insights panel discussion.
“One of the things we noticed was Brad Hodge… had a phenomenal T20I record in Australia and had probably played 5-6 IPLs, and had a very average or poor record in India. Once we looked at the data closely, we sort of realised why he was struggling in India. He was clearly a player who was very good against fast bowling, but wasn’t very good against, say, left-arm spin bowling and leg spin. But he had an incredible strength of being good against fast bowling.
“One of the things we looked at was, which is the position of the game where someone like Hodge will play only fast bowling, and we sort of looked at the last four-five overs where everyone brings their best death bowlers back into the game. We decided at that stage that we will buy him in the auction, and bat him in the last 5-6 overs in the match.
“Hodge, as you know, is an Australian batsman who is really proud of his batting ability, and he is used to batting in the top three in Australia. He was obviously resistant to this when we told him [to bat down the order] initially. But then we were able to show him data, and his success against fast bowling, and how critical it was for a team like us [that] didn’t have the firepower – like CSK had [MS] Dhoni, MI had Kieron Pollard or RCB had an AB de Villiers,” Dravid added.
In the 2012 edition Hodge scored 245 runs with an average of 30.62 and strike-rate of 140.00. Next season when the franchise qualified for the playoffs the Aussie batsman had 293 runs under his belt at an average of 41.85 and strike-rate of 134.40 and most those runs were scored during the death overs. Hodge scored one fifty in that edition, which was the match-winning 54 not out off just 29 balls against Sunrisers Hyderabad.