A bowling average is partly a record of who bowled at the tail

Cheap late wickets and expensive top order wickets go into the same column, and the column pretends they cost the same.

The eleventh batter is not a wicket. Not in any sense worth measuring.

He is a formality with a bat, and the bowler who gets him picks up the same unit of credit as the bowler who removed a set opener on a flat second morning. Divide runs by wickets and both dismissals push the average in the same direction with the same weight. This is not a subtle bias. Over a long career it is the difference between two bowlers looking equivalent and one of them plainly being better.

Two mechanisms are at work. Wickets are not equal in value, everyone knows it, and nobody adjusts for it in the headline number. And tail wickets are not distributed randomly. They go to whoever is bowling when the tail arrives, which is a function of captaincy, of who holds an end, of who is fresh at the right moment. Some bowlers spend careers with the new ball and the top six. Others clean up. Their averages get compared as though the opportunity set was shared.

You can see the shape of it without doing anything clever. Split any bowler's record by the batting position of the dismissed player. The averages against positions one to six and against positions eight to eleven are different worlds, and the aggregate sits wherever the mix happened to fall.

The obvious objection is that dismissing the tail still wins matches. True, and beside the point. The claim is not that tail wickets are worthless. It is that summing unequal things and dividing produces a number you cannot read backwards. If I show you an average of twenty six, you cannot recover from it whether the bowler was a top order specialist or an efficient finisher, and those are different players with different market values.

I would print position adjusted averages as standard, and I suspect a few reputations would move noticeably. Not collapse. Move.

There is a version of this argument that goes too far, and I want to avoid it. Adjustment invites endless tinkering until the metric encodes only what the analyst already believed. The discipline has to be that the adjustment stays simple, published, and reproducible from a scorecard.

Batting position appears on every scorecard ever kept. We have declined to use it for a century because the single number is tidier. Tidy is not the same as informative.