Last week, during a discussion on the Facebook Group 'Boys in Green' regarding the ability, or rather the lack of, of Pakistan's batsmen in ODIs, a fellow member Aoun Jafarey brought up the ‘rotation rate’ and used it to assess how Pakistan's batsmen are lagging far behind all other ODI batsmen playing the game today. In a similar discussion with another friend, we brought up the ‘boundary rate’ to explain the same issue of why Pakistan's ODI batting is suffering.

Let me first explain what the ‘rotation rate’ and ‘boundary rate’ are.

The rotation rate (RR) is the number of runs a batsman scores off the deliveries that are not hit for a boundary. The RR basically signifies how well a batsman rotates strike, which is an essential component of building a partnership and easing the pressure, particularly in ODIs. Smashing fours and sixes is all well and good, but what batsmen manage on deliveries that are not pummeled to the boundary goes a long way in defining their innings.

The boundary rate (BR) is the number of deliveries a batsman faces before he hits a four or a six. The BR demonstrates how quickly a batsman scores boundaries, which has become the way of ‘modern’ ODI batting, a term used frequently by new captain Azhar Ali since taking charge.

Let us take a look at a recent instance: Azhar Ali's maiden ODI century in the third ODI against Bangladesh. Azhar scored 101 off 112 deliveries with 10 fours, meaning that if you take out the 40 runs he scored in 10 deliveries, Azhar managed 61 runs off the other 102 deliveries that he faced - a rotation rate of 59.8. He had a boundary rate of 11.2, implying that he hit every 11th delivery for a four.

Is that good or not? How does that compare with other batsmen of this era? What is the benchmark for RR and BR for ODI batsmen? Here is what we discovered.

For a historical perspective, here are the rotation and boundary rates of batsmen with over 10,000 runs in ODIs. The average RR for these batsmen is 47.6, essentially meaning that they rotate the strike on average every two (and a bit) deliveries. The average BR is 12.5, implying that that they hit a four or six after every 12 deliveries on average.