Who's Actually the Best Batter in the CPL This Season?
- Caleb
- 23 Aug 2026
True SR vs True Survival
CPL 2026 · qualified batters (min 30 balls faced)
Each dot is one qualified CPL batter this season (min 30 balls faced, 2026), colour-coded by team — hover any of them for the full breakdown. Names that would otherwise crowd a neighbour are hidden; every dot is still real data.
Greetings, I hope you all are enjoying the 2026 CPL season as much as I am. I've really enjoyed writing these blog posts, as well as updating the website with line and length data and the True SR/Eco stats.
But while watching the season, I noticed how True SR can be manipulated to make a player appear better than they actually are. Let's take Rahkeem Cornwall and Nicholas Pooran. Both of their True SR values sit very close to each other: Cornwall at +2.31 and Pooran at +2.39. So which player is the better batsman? Well, it's hard to tell.
If you look at their averages, you can begin to tell the story: Cornwall averages 22.75 runs per dismissal while Pooran averages 43.5. So if you were picking a player for Fantasy CPL, all things being equal, you'd easily pick Pooran because he scores more runs before being dismissed, even though both bat at a similar clip.
But average is an imperfect number, because Cornwall bats in the 1 or 2 spot while Pooran generally bats at number 3. This means their averages don't make for an easy comparison, since they bat at different spots in the order.
So this is where I decided to create a scatterplot that more accurately tells the story of who's actually the better batter. It's still early days in the CPL season, so once more balls come in, we'll be able to tell more easily who the best batter is. But for this scatterplot, I needed a new stat, so let me introduce True Survival Rate. True Survival Rate measures how well a batter avoids getting out. But not every ball is equal, so we take that into account and adjust for how risky the specific balls they faced actually were. It's not just a raw balls-per-dismissal average. The numbers are pulled from every season in the dataset, 2024 through 2026 of the CPL.
So now, looking back at Cornwall and Pooran, we can clearly see who's more effective: Cornwall sits at 17.29 True Survival Rate and Pooran sits at 24.5. This new stat isn't perfect by any means, and in the coming years I may smile on it or frown on it depending on how it holds up. But for now, I think it's a good way of keeping an eye on how well a batter is doing.
