Boundary percentage flatters the batter who never bothers running twos

A single ratio rewards hitting to the rope and records nothing about the running that keeps a middle order moving.

Two batters, both scoring at a run a ball, one of them barely moving.

The first hits four boundaries in an over and blocks the rest. The second runs eleven twos in a session, turns ones into twos when the fielder is slow, and puts the strike where it needs to be. Boundary percentage says the first player is the more damaging batter. In a great many match situations it is plainly the wrong answer, and the metric has no mechanism for saying so.

The ratio is boundary runs over total runs, or boundary balls over balls faced, depending on who is publishing. Either way the denominator hides the interesting part. Running is compressed into the residual. It appears only as the absence of something else, which means the entire skill of converting ones into twos, of stealing a run to a deep fielder's weaker side, of putting the better player on strike, is invisible by construction.

That would matter less if the metric were used carefully. It is not. Boundary percentage has become a shorthand for scoring power in franchise recruitment, and shorthand travels further than the caveats attached to it. Analysts know the limits. Auction rooms use the number.

There is a subtler distortion too. Boundary percentage is sensitive to ground dimensions in a way that is rarely adjusted for. Play half your cricket at a small ground with short square boundaries and your percentage rises without any change in how you bat. Play at a large one and mishits that would have cleared the rope get caught, which does not merely reduce the numerator, it removes you from the innings entirely.

The clean version of the statistic would be runs above expectation given the shot played and the ground played on, with running credited separately. That is buildable from existing tracking data. It is also less quotable, which is most of why it does not appear.

I would still keep boundary percentage for one purpose, which is to describe how a batter scores rather than how well. As a description of method it is fine and quite revealing. As a ranking it is a mess, because the ranking silently assumes that all runs off the bat arrive by the same route and only the route through the rope is worth counting.

Running between the wickets was never measured properly, so it slowly stopped being valued. That is not an accident of taste. That is what happens when one column gets a number and the other does not.