Defining a paisa vasool index

How do you judge a cricketer’s “worth”? Srinivas Bhogle has an interesting perspective on the subject. Read on…

We live in times when a Shane Watson is “bought” for US$125,000 and Rohit Sharma for $750,000. So someone’s surely going to ask what the return on this investment is, i.e. is this a paisa vasool investment?

Answering such questions isn’t easy. Obviously, the answer would depend on the player’s on-field performance … and things are trickier in T20 cricket because, apart from runs and wickets, strike rates, economy rates and fielding ability also enter the calculation.

Thankfully, the Castrol Index (CI) could do the job of measuring the player’s on-field performance rather well. The CI judiciously combines a player’s batting, bowling and fielding effort into a single number.

While the CI is an interesting concept by itself, it doesn’t answer that key question: which player is paisa vasool and which player isn’t? However by dividing the money paid to a player so far (if the player has been available for 9 matches so far out of 14, we assume that he has received 9/14th of his total payment) by his CI, we obtain an index (that we could call the Castrol Paisa Vasool Index) that will do the job very adequately.

When we attempted such an analysis, a handful of interesting observations tumbled out of the cupboard:

# It is unwise to pay too much for single cricketing skills. A good ‘pure bowler’ could at best command a price of $500,000. Paying Ishant Sharma $950,000 is a big waste of money. Even Rohit Sharma wouldn’t be worth $750,000 if he didn’t bowl a bit too (and a hat-trick, as in IPL2, would be a real bonus!)

# A player possessing explosive skills that can turn a match around is good value for money … that’s why a Virender Sehwag, Tillakaratne Dilshan, Ross Taylor or Kieron Pollard is still a coveted catch … they could single-handedly win you 3-4 of the 14 or more IPL matches. To appreciate this better, read Ananth’s masterly analysis of JP Duminy’s knock in the Champions League for Cape Cobras.

# If the pitches are batsmen-friendly, pick bowling all-rounders; if they are bowler-friendly, pick batting all-rounders. Jacques Kallis is a fine example: he flopped in batting-friendly IPL1, but was immensely successful in bowling-friendly IPL2.

# Specialist wicket-keepers are not worth the money unless they bat well too. So if you can’t be an Adam Gilchrist, at least try to be a Kamran Akmal. And Brad Haddin can go home!

But the most significant finding of the analysis was that franchise owners accorded equal or more weightage to a player’s off-field value. Mashrafe Mortaza’s price of $600,000 didn’t make any sense … till you factored in the fact that, by playing him, Kolkata Knight Riders bought the loyalty of the whole of Bangladesh. Kevin Pietersen’s cricketing worth could certainly not be worth $1,550,000 … till you recognized that he was a great choice to walk down the ramp with Deepika Padukone.

So how do we set up the complete model of a paisa vasool index? The Castrol Index will estimate the on-field performance admirably. To couple on-field performance with off-field worth, we will need a more complicated hedonic pricing model – that could someday form the basis for a future Interpreter blog.