Imagine a basketball player who averaged not 30 points per game, like Michael Jordan, but 95 — for an entire career. Imagine a golfer who didn’t win 15 majors, like Tiger Woods, but 50. Imagine a hockey player who didn’t accumulate 2,857 career points, like Wayne Gretzky, but eight or nine thousand. This is the order of magnitude required to construct a hypothetical Bradman-equivalent in any other sport, and no athlete in the recorded history of any major sport has come remotely close to producing such a figure. The actual person who did the equivalent in his own sport was a small, sharp-eyed Australian named Sir Donald George Bradman. Bradman played 52 Test matches for Australia between 1928 and 1948, an unusually short career by modern standards (the leading contemporary players accumulate 150 or more Tests), interrupted in the middle by a six-year hiatus during the Second World War, during which essentially no international cricket was played. Across those 52 matches he batted 80 times, was dismissed 70 times (he was undefeated at the end of 10 innings, which under cricket’s scoring conventions means those innings count toward his total runs but not toward the divisor of his average), and scored a cumulative total of 6,996 runs. Divide the total runs by the number of dismissals and you get the most famous individual statistic in sport: 99.94. The figure has not been challenged since 1948. It will, by every available statistical projection, not be challenged in the foreseeable future. The second-best career Test batting average in the 137-year history of the sport, held by the South African Graeme Pollock from a career between 1963 and 1970, is 60.97. The third is 60.83. The gap between Bradman and the rest of cricket history is, by an order of magnitude, the largest single-individual statistical separation that exists in any major sport.
According to a 2015 analysis in Significance, the journal of the Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association, by the statistician Stephen Walters, the mathematical interpretation of Bradman’s average is straightforward. The mean career batting average of all Test cricketers with more than 2,000 career runs is 40.42, with a standard deviation of 9.19. Bradman’s 99.94 sits at a Z-score of approximately 6.48 — meaning he was approximately six and a half standard deviations above the average for the entire qualifying population. In a normal distribution, a six-sigma event occurs approximately once in every 500 million observations. The number of human beings who have ever played professional cricket is somewhere in the range of tens of thousands. The probability of a single Bradman emerging by chance from a population that small is, by the standard statistical calculation, vanishingly close to zero. He should not have existed. The 80 Test innings he played should not, on any reasonable model of how athletic performance is distributed in human populations, have produced the cumulative result they did.
What the comparison with other sports shows
The same statistical methodology, applied to the great individual performances of other sports, produces substantially smaller Z-scores in every case. As detailed in OUTLIERS, a statistical analysis of the most dominant individual athletes ever measured against their peers, Wayne Gretzky’s career NHL scoring sits approximately three standard deviations above the mean of elite hockey players — the gap between his 2,857 career points and Jaromír Jágr’s 1,921 is substantial, but not Bradman-substantial. Michael Jordan’s career scoring average of 30.12 points per game sits at approximately three standard deviations above the NBA’s elite mean. Tiger Woods’s 15 major championships sit roughly 3.2 standard deviations above the mean for elite golfers. Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic each sit approximately three standard deviations above the tennis mean, and importantly are clustered within four titles of each other — meaning none of them is a true single-individual outlier in the way Bradman is. Pelé, Diego Maradona, and Lionel Messi each sit at roughly three to three-and-a-half standard deviations above the football mean. The pattern across every major sport is consistent. The most dominant individual performers sit two to three and a half standard deviations above the elite mean. Bradman sits at six and a half.
As described by a Cricket Web statistical investigation comparing Bradman’s dominance rating to the leaders of other major sports, the alternative methodologies for measuring sporting dominance — adjusting for the value of runs versus dead runs, using restricted samples of only the most elite practitioners, applying various normalising corrections for era and conditions — all produce essentially the same conclusion. Whether you measure Bradman against the 167 best batsmen of all time (a methodology employed by the statistician Nigel Marriott, which produces a Z-score of approximately 9), against the entire population of qualifying Test batsmen (Walters’s 6.48), or against the elite subsample of those averaging over 50 (a Z-score of approximately 5.4), the answer remains: Bradman is, by a substantial and statistically robust margin, the most dominant individual sporting performer ever measured against his own peers in any major sport. The figure varies between approximately five and nine standard deviations depending on the sample. Every other comparable athlete from every other comparable sport sits comfortably within three.
The final innings
The arithmetic of Bradman’s career produces one of its more poignant historical details. As discussed in a Marriott Statistics analysis of the mathematical structure of Bradman’s career and the specific innings that determined his final average, his career batting average across the first 79 innings stood at 101.39. He needed four runs in his 80th and final innings — the second innings of the fifth Test of the 1948 series against England, played at The Oval in London on 14 August 1948 — to finish his career with a batting average of exactly 100. The crowd at The Oval, knowing the situation, gave him a standing ovation as he walked to the wicket. The English players reportedly stood in a circle around him and applauded as he took guard. He faced two balls from the leg-spin bowler Eric Hollies. The first he played defensively for no run. The second pitched in front of him, turned sharply, beat his attempted forward stroke, and clipped the top of his off stump. He was bowled for zero. He walked off the field with a career batting average of 99.94 — four runs short of the round figure he had been on track to achieve.
The legend that has grown around the final innings is that Bradman, with tears in his eyes from the emotion of the crowd’s reception, simply did not see the second ball clearly. The BBC’s commentator John Arlott, broadcasting live, suggested as much at the time: he wondered aloud whether the great batsman could really see the ball at all in such circumstances. Whether the explanation is accurate or merely sentimental, the result is the same. The most extreme individual statistical performance in the history of organised sport is encoded in a single figure — 99.94 — that has the curious additional property of being four runs short of an even rounder number that would have been less mathematically interesting but more humanly satisfying. The figure has stood, unchallenged, for 78 years. The current closest active player to it, Steve Smith, has a career average in the mid-50s, approximately 45 runs short. The next-closest figure in the entire history of the sport, Graeme Pollock’s 60.97, is approximately 39 runs short. No realistic projection of any current player’s future trajectory comes within striking distance. Bradman, by every available measure that statisticians have been able to construct, was not merely the best batsman in the history of cricket. He was, by a margin no comparable athlete from any other sport has ever approached, the most dominant individual performer in the recorded history of organised sport.
