The archive: where every number comes from
15,270 matches, 49,927 rated player-seasons, and not one figure copied from another rating system.
Every number in SPIN XI is computed from ball-by-ball records of matches that were actually played. The source is Cricsheet, which publishes them freely and explicitly for this kind of use.
What is in it
| Matches ingested | 15,270 |
| Rated player-seasons | 49,927 |
| In the draftable archive | 42,165 |
| Squad-seasons | 2,486 |
| Distinct players | 3,989 |
| Teams | 168 |
| Competitions | 14 |
| Seasons covered | 2002–2026 |
The competitions are Test cricket, one-day internationals and Twenty20 internationals, together with the Indian T20 League, the T20 Blast, the Big Bash, the Bangladesh Premier League, the Caribbean Premier League, the Pakistan Super League, The Hundred, the Lanka Premier League, the SA20, Major League Cricket and the Mzansi Super League.
A squad is who actually played
A squad in SPIN XI is everyone who took the field for that side that season — between eleven and thirty-four players, eighteen on average. Players who were signed but never played are absent, because a ball-by-ball record cannot see them, and inventing them would put men in elevens they never belonged to.
What is joined on from elsewhere
Two things are not in the ball-by-ball data and are read from public sources rather than guessed:
- Nationality and full names, joined to Wikidata by Cricsheet identifier. Scorecards record “CH Gayle”, which is not a name you would put on a card.
- Stated role and bowling style, read from each player’s own Wikipedia entry — 2,077 bowlers have their pace or spin recorded rather than inferred. A medium-pacer and an off-spinner can have identical figures, and nothing in the deliveries distinguishes them.
Partnerships
Every delivery names the striker and the man at the other end, so a real record of who has batted with whom falls out of the same pass that counts the runs. 9,455 pairs have faced enough deliveries together to be worth knowing about, and it is why a side of players who have actually played together is worth a little more than eleven strangers of the same rating.
What is deliberately not in it
- No ratings from anywhere else. Nothing is scraped from a commercial statistics provider, and no rating is copied. The numbers are this game’s reading of the public record and nobody else’s.
- No official logos, crests or player photographs. Team and player names are used descriptively.
- No invented players and no invented matches. Where the record is silent the archive is silent.
How it is checked
The archive is verified as a whole rather than sampled. All 42,165 rows are checked against nineteen rules each. A separate check reads a thousand generated scorecards looking for cricket a scorer would refuse to write down — three runs off the ball that got a batter out, eleven dismissals against ten wickets, 4.4 overs in a twenty-over game. All three of those were real faults, caught that way.
Licensing and use
Cricsheet data is published for public use and this game is one of the uses it was published for. SPIN XI is an independent fan-made project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or associated with any cricket board, league, franchise, player association or ratings provider.
More on how this is built
- How SPIN XI rates a cricketer — Every rating in SPIN XI is computed from ball-by-ball records of matches that were actually played. This is the method, including the three times it was wrong.
- How the match engine works — SPIN XI plays every delivery between the man bowling and the man facing. The score is what comes out, and so is the result. This is how.
- The best seasons in the archive — The highest-rated player-seasons across 15,270 matches of Test, one-day and Twenty20 cricket — and why all-rounders dominate the top of the list.
- Which Twenty20 league is hardest to play in? — Not an opinion. A measurement of what the same players did in different leagues, from ball-by-ball records of every match.
- How to draft a side that actually wins — What ten thousand simulated seasons say about building an eleven in SPIN XI: where the rating misleads you, and what to take when the squad is thin.
- About SPIN XI — A free cricket drafting game built on the public ball-by-ball record. What it is, who made it, and what it is not.