Who is the IPL's master of each length?

One bowler emerges above all others: he's the best on a length and back of a length, and in fact owns the entire IPL pitch.

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This is a work of art. It’s at first a mess, some kind of collection of random data that has been dropped onto a canvas like a bunch of dogs with saliva-dripping tennis balls. But within that, you can tell the history of seam bowling in the IPL. And maybe most importantly, it actually shows one of the best careers anyone’s ever had.

Each colour represents a different length that a seamer with 100 balls has delivered in the last ten years of the IPL. So the pink ones up near the top, that is the poor guys who have bowled the full tosses a lot, and they have been spanked. The yellow is the bouncer, again another ball that goes for runs. Dark blue is the full balls that go very far later in games. Purple is back of a length, when the bowlers hit the wicket hard. And the light blue is your classic good length, that still works the best, but sadly seamers can’t live on it.

What is clear is each length is more or less clumped together. Sure, it works better for some, and not for others. But they all follow a similar pattern.

If you start to look with a microscope, you see full tosses are bad, but really not that much more expensive than bouncers. Full balls get met too, so if you go for a yorker and are overpitched, you get hit slightly worse than underpitched – which explains why bowlers are so terrified of trying them.

There is a subtle difference between good and back of a length, and it’s in the wicket taking. You see that there is light blue in the front under only a touch of purple.

This shows you similarities, there are also huge differences. But within all these pretty coloured dots, the question that must be asked crassly is this: which bowler has the best length?

These are your best full toss bowlers. It is not something you want to be good at, but for slower ball bowlers and yorker specialists (which makes up about 75% of all seamers) it’s going to happen. The list is this small, which is actually quite nice. Lasith Malinga was the early king of this. In fact, for a while, his full toss was better than many other bowlers hitting the deck.

But what I expected here was for Jasprit Bumrah to dominate this, and while he’s good in runs per over, and the only seamer going at less than ten an over, you could argue that Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Chris Morris are better. Almost as economical, and with a much better average. I’m assuming this is because both are yorker specialists, and most of their full tosses are quite low.

Yet, T Natarajan is similar, and he doesn’t take wickets while going for heaps of runs.

But there are other interesting bowlers here. Harshal Patel and Dwayne Bravo are very similar bowlers, both rely a huge amount on their slower ball. Yet Harshal gets a lot of wickets from his full tosses, and Bravo never did. Special shout out for Sandeep Sharma, who for a very accurate bowler can deliver a very high full toss, and they do get hit.

Full deliveries was another category that Malinga used to dominate, but Matheesha Pathirana has taken that over with a similar action. Whether he can keep that up now that he has changed how he bowls will be very interesting. Siddarth Kaul had a great record with this delivery as well.

Andre Russell gets a lot of wickets, but leaks runs, which is about par for him.

Morris and Harshal are near each other again, suggesting they’re far closer as nearest neighbours than I would have thought. Bumrah is very economical, but doesn’t take a wicket.

Another big-name Indian is more fun, Bhuvi Kumar. He struggles to take wickets more when he lands the ball, than when he doesn’t. What sort of weirdness is this?