Mitchell Starc and the pink ball

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Find someone who makes the pink ball talk the way Mitchell Starc does. With the red one, Starc is relatively ordinary in Tests. He is good early in the innings, can still get great bounce, and when cricket had reverse swing, he was good at that. 

But his record suggests that he’s slightly above replacement-level with the red ball. With the pink one, he destroys batters. 

Think about the last two Tests. He looked in great rhythm in Perth, a ground where extra height is very helpful. Even though the ball came out fine, he did not take a lot of wickets. In Adelaide, the ball is a luminescent pink, and the same deliveries are suddenly all grenades. 

What happens to Mitchell Starc when he touches that magenta hot rock?

Maybe the better question is, where does Starc fit in as a Test bowler? For a long time, Cummins was tracking as the next McGrath. In the last few years, he has slowed down a bit. It seems that he will have a Dennis Lillee-like career now. 

Josh Hazlewood focused on white ball cricket, and that is all sorted out now—World Cups in the back pocket, and IPL cheques in the wallet. This year, he averages 13 in Tests. His legacy is very secure now, with a bowling average of under 25 currently.

Where is Starc? He is included with them. Australia had this incredible quartet of quicks. But sadly, James Pattinson had a short career due to injuries. Cummins-Hazlewood-Starc have become this incredible seam bowling trio. Throw Lyon in the mix, and you have a great bowling quartet. They have singular identities, but maybe we think about them most as a group.

Starc on his own is not bad, he is between Jason Gillespie and Jeff Thomson. But a lot of that has to do with him getting a boost from the day-night Tests. This is the stat we have all seen a million times.

Starc's love affair with the pink ball turns him from ordinary to one of the greatest bowlers in history. His bowling with the red ball is not great. If Australia had not changed to day-night Tests, his red ball career might have been over already, or at least far less frequent. 

Averages can be deceiving, because the overall mark will anyway be lower in the pink ball matches. What about match factor?

With the crimson traveller, he is bang on average as a Test seamer. With the white ball, is is one of the best of all time, 34% better than anyone else. With the pink, that jumps to a barely believable match factor ratio of 1.74. 

Put it this way: Australia can rest Starc for all red ball games, and then bring him back with the magenta monster until he can run in no more. 

Krunk on Youtube asked about Starc versus Brett Lee. Because of their averages, many would see Starc as the better bowler. But he played in a great era for bowlers, and was aided by the pink ball and Kookaburra reinforcing the seam. You can see that Lee actually did better in his matches than Starc has.

For instance, these two bowlers played on very different Adelaide Ovals. In Lee's day, it was the flattest track in the land. These days, the only signs of that is Adelaide Oval's higher overall average compared to most day-night Tests. This was traditionally a batting paradise that's completely changed, with the drop-in surface and the extra grass to protect the pink ball. 

But the pink balls move all the more. Yet, compared to the rest of the world—though no other ground has had more than three games—Adelaide is not actually a deadly pitch under lights. 

Things get more interesting. Starc averages 15.5 in pink ball Tests in Adelaide, and 21.7 in other grounds.

He is way better than everyone else in Adelaide. But once he takes the pink ball in another place, he’s not as much of a standout.

Clearly, he likes Adelaide Oval more than most grounds, but the colour of the ball also matters. Mitchell Starc is not a specialist pink ball bowler, nor a specialist Adelaide seamer, he is specifically a quick who loves day-night Tests in Adelaide. 

Compare that with him taking wickets in the first over. We all talk about it, and he’s really good at doing it. There is a conflation because of how many times he’s done it in limited overs as well. But during his career, only James Anderson has more wickets—in 76 more overs. No one else is that close. 

Starc is very good at bowling with the brand new ball. 

Although his average is better in the first over compared to the next 79 overs, it's not impossible to play him. He might be the best in the world at this, but the stats don't pop. We tend to remember his wickets because they are a lot more dramatic when he takes them early.  

The same with swing. We talk about it, but for most of his career Starc hasn’t really swung the ball much. Sometimes, he swings the very new ball. But over the years he has struggled with his wrist, and trying to learn the wobbleball (although maybe it happened earlier) almost killed his swing completely. 

Today, he took wickets swinging the ball early, then bowling shorter with extra bounce, before finding more swing again. This Mitchell Starc is a very different beast. But that is the pink ball. A Kookaburra ball won't swing as much in his second spell, but the extra lacquer here allowed him to be at his best. Swing early and to the tail, and bounce when he needed that. 

Watching Starc here is like watching the best bowler in the world. 

Yet, that is not what his record suggests at all. Even in an incredible era for seam bowling around the world, he hasn’t averaged under 26 since 2020. The whole world has been taken poles, and he has missed out. 

In the middle of his career, he had this incredible peak. For the rest of it, he’s been okay. The moments you see his average dip is often because of the pink ball, in Adelaide. 

When you seen anomalies like this, people say that means the player isn’t very good. But there are many people who have bowled with the pink ball, in Adelaide, and other grounds, and they don’t achieve what Starc has. 

He is clearly at his best with this kind of ball. The extra swing of the lighter coloured balls has always helped him. But the white ball stops moving pretty quickly, and goes soft. The magenta one doesn’t. The extra lacquer stays on, and it keeps the ball harder, and it swings for longer—two things that help Starc. Of course, it mostly helps him more in Adelaide, a place that has been a batting paradise throughout the history of the game.

But when Mitchell Starc gets a pink ball, it is a nightmare for the batters.