What was Don Bradman's strike rate?

By Adrian Meredith

MELBOURNE, Australia (TheSportsNEXT) October 23, 2012: In Don Bradman's time, they didn't often record number of balls faced - usually instead recording number of minutes. However, because Bradman was such a quick scoring player, they have actually gone through most of the matches in which he played and recorded the number of balls faced - often just for Bradman. As such, I can get a reasonable estimate.

Of matches where balls were recorded, his strike rate was 58.77.

In these matches, the number of minutes of the innings were almost identical to the number of balls faced (overall), thus giving him a runs per 100 minutes of 58.67

In the matches where balls were not recorded, he scored at a rate of 79.03 runs per 100 minutes.

As such, overall, his strike rate per 100 minutes was 61.44.

Given the estimated number of minutes per ball, his estimated strike rate is 61.54.

Thus Don Bradman's estimated strike rate in test matches was 61.54.

Note: I did this entirely myself based on Cricinfo's records. It took me about an hour.