Stat attack: Dominic Hendricks scores highest batting average in last 3 MODC campaigns

We take a look at the highest average of players who have played 18 innings or more in the last three seasons of the One Day Cup – 2017/18, 2018/19 and 2019/2020 seasons.

The average of a batsman, and a bowler for that matter, is quite obviously the best gauge to determine which players have performed the best in their discipline, as it formulaically focuses on consistency, rather than on one or two spells of brilliance.

This assessment will measure the highest averages of all the batsmen in the Momentum One Day Cup over the last three seasons, but will only consider the players who had played in a large majority of matches for their respective teams.

Because averages are more accurate when consistency is considered, the batsmen who played more – rather than less – matches over the respective seasons were charted.

Again, this list would favour the batsmen who had been the most consistent and seasoned players for their respective franchise.

With each season mostly comprising 10 matches in the round-robin phase before the play-offs, this would bring the assessed total to 30 matches per player.

Therefore, players were only considered for this ranking system if they had batted in 18 or more innings across the three seasons, which is at least 60 per cent of their team’s total matches.

For example, Markram has an insane average in the last two seasons (2018/19 and 2019/20) with an average of over 70, but he only played 14 matches in this time because he never played in the 2017/18 season.

This variable had eliminated many batsmen from the mix, but it separated the consistent performers from the ‘one-hit-wonder’ players – after all, averages are more accurate the more innings that are taken into account.

It provides an interesting scope of which players had been esteemed servants for South African domestic cricket throughout the most recent white-ball campaigns.

After having batted in 21 innings, Dominic Hendricks tops the standings with the best average of 50.00 on the dot. The 29-year-old Lions star scored a total of 950 runs, the sixth most out of all the consistent run-scorers.

The Titans’ Tony de Zorzi closely follows in second with an average of 49.70 in 24 innings, scoring in the process 1143 runs, the third-highest in the run-scoring list.

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Top 10 highest batting averages in the MODC as from 2017 till 2020: