Duckworth Lewis Book

Yesterday at the local council library, I came across this book called “Duckworth Lewis” written by Frank Duckworth and Tony Lewis (who “invented” the eponymous rain rule). While I’d never heard about the book, given my general interest in sports analytics I picked it up, and duly finished reading it by this morning.

The good thing about the book is that though it’s in some way a collective autobiography of Duckworth and Lewis, they restrict their usual life details to a minimum, and mostly focus on what they are famous for. There are occasions when they go into too much detail describing a trip to either Australia or the West Indies, but it’s easy to filter out such stuff and read the book for the rain rule.

Then again, it isn’t a great book. If you’re not interested in cricket analytics there isn’t that much for you to know from the book. But given that it’s a quick read, it doesn’t hurt so much! Anyway, here are some pertinent observations:

1. Duckworth and Lewis didn’t get paid much for their method. They managed to get the ICC to accept their method sometime in the mid 90s, but it wasn’t until the early 2000s, by when Lewis had become a business school professor, that they managed to strike a financial deal with ICC. Even when they did, they make it sound like they didn’t make much money off it.
2. The method came about when Duckworth quickly put together something for a statistics conference he was organising, where another speaker who was supposed to speak about cricket pulled out at the last minute. Lewis later came across the paper, and then got one of his undergrad students to do a project about it. The two men subsequently collaborated
3. It’s amazing (not in a positive way) the kind of data that went into the method. Until the early 2000s, the only dataset that was used to calibrate the method was what was put together by Lewis’s undergrad. And this was mostly English County games, played over 40, 55 and 60 overs. Even after that, the frequency of updation with new data (which reflects new playing styles and strategies) is rather low.
4. The system doesn’t seem to have been particularly well software engineered – it was initially simply coded up by Duckworth, and until as late as 2007 it ran on the DOS operating system. It was only in 2008 or so, when Steven Stern joined the team (now the method is called DLS to include his name), that a windows version was introduced.
5. There is very little discussion of alternate methods, and though there is a chapter about it, Duckworth and Lewis are rather dismissive about them. For example, another popular method is by this guy called V Jayadevan from Thrissur. Here is some excellent analysis by Srinivas Bhogle where he compares the two methods. Duckworth and Lewis spend a couple of pages listing a couple of scenarios where Jayadevan’s method doesn’t work, and then spends a paragraph disparaging Bhogle for his support of the VJD method.
6. This was the biggest takeaway from the book for me – the Duckworth Lewis method doesn’t equalise probabilities of victory of the two teams before and after the rain interruption. Instead, the method equalises the margin of victory between the teams before and after the break. So let’s say a team was 10 runs behind the DL “par score” when it rains. When the game restarts, the target is set such that the team is still 10 runs behind the par score! They make an attempt to explain why this is superior to equalising probabilities of winning  but don’t go too far with it.
7. The adoption of Duckworth Lewis seems like a fairly random event. Following the World Cup 1992 debacle (when South Africa’s target went from 22 off 13 to 22 off 1 ball after a rain break), there was a demand for new rain rules. Duckworth and Lewis somehow managed to explain their method to the ECB secretary. And since it was superior to everything that was there then, it simply got adopted. And then it became incumbent, and became hard to dislodge!
8. There is no mention in the book about the inherent unfairness of the DL method (in that it can be unfair to some playing styles).

Ok this is already turning out to be a long post, but one final takeaway is that there’s a fair amount of randomness in sports analytics, and you shouldn’t get into it if your only potential customer is a national sporting body. In that sense, developments such as the IPL are good for sports analytics!