L-R, what is it good for?

Absolutely nothing? Not quite — there is, in fact, quite a bit of merit behind teams’ insistence on making sure that a left-right batting combination is at the crease. Today I will attempt to go behind the scenes of this phenomenon with my lens squarely focused on the IPL.

There’s been a steady increase in the % of balls faced by a left-right pair at the crease and this number has been consistently above 50% since 2018. 2024 and 2025 are also the only two instances of left-right pairs striking at over 150.

LHB-RHB: % Balls Faced vs Strike Rate by Year in IPL

The converse also appears to be true — with the right-right combination facing the fewest % of balls in the last six seasons.

RHB-RHB: % Balls Faced vs Strike Rate by Year in IPL

Southpaws are a rare commodity — and rarer still are two southpaws batting together. As is evidenced by this left-left crease combo plot of % balls faced vs Strike Rate over the years. It is also interesting to see the first two seasons of the IPL featuring so highly in the x-axis of this plot — 7/10 top run getters during this period were LHBs, including a top 3 of Gilchrist, Raina and Gambhir. Side note: there is no doubting the impact of the impact player rule — strike rates of all three types of crease combinations being at their all time highs since 2023.

LHB-LHB: % Balls Faced vs Strike Rate by Year in IPL

The biggest argument though in favour of left-right combinations is that it is effective when countering spin. Once again, while there has been a steady increase in the % of balls faced by a left-right pair vs spin, there is no marked increase in strike rates other than the three impact player years.

LHB-RHB vs Spin: % Balls Faced vs Strike Rate by Year in IPL

If you’ve been following carefully, you’re probably wondering if this means left-right pairs are actually more effective vs pace in terms of strike rate rather than spin. While I believe this to be true from the data, I think the slightly more nuanced take here is that pace is more commonly bowled in the powerplay and the death overs where strike rates are higher on average — but spin is largely bowled through the middle to contain the scoring rate and hence, lower strike rates.

I believe a lot of the discourse about having a left-right pair to face spin has to do with how spin matchups are “traditionally” perceived — i.e, ball going away from batter bad, ball coming into batter good. And having a left-right pair at the crease means that assuming strike is rotated, all six balls of a spinner’s over cannot be against his “favourable” matchup. It is with this theory in mind that the groundwork for this piece began with modifications to my database.

Query Builder Filters and Groups

The plots described so far have been based on data with just two “filters” — league and bowler type — with the results grouped by year and crease_combo. To test this “traditional” matchup theory — I added another column to my database called ball_direction. Applicable only to spinners, ball_direction holds one of two values — intoBatter and awayFromBatter — purely based on the bowler’s pre-determined bowling type and the batter’s stance. As a simple example, all deliveries where an RHB is on strike vs a RO (right arm offbreak) bowler have the ball_direction as intoBatter.

The eagle-eyed amongst you already have your pitchforks out for this classification and for you I have two reasons to explain my choice.

1 — I did not have the facilities to compile and integrate hawkeye data into my database to determine the “true” ball direction (also because BCCI has stopped letting people scrape hawkeye data off their website I believe), and

2 — The theory that I wanted to test was the traditional perception of spinners vs batter stances anyway. As an example, there have been several questionable calls recently of not bowling quality left-arm orthodox simply because an LHB was at the crease.

Batters vs Spin: % Balls Faced vs Strike Rate by Year and Ball Direction in IPL

Around 60% of balls bowled by spin, across all 17 seasons of the IPL have been “away” from the batter — i.e right arm leg-break and left-arm orthodox vs RHBs and right arm off-break and left arm chinaman vs LHBs. And the slight upward shift of the intoBatter cluster tells me that this traditional matchup perception is also not without its merits.

Unsurprisingly, filtering the above plot to only include RHB-RHB crease_combos results in a very similar looking plot — with an even higher % balls going away from the RHB batters ~75%. I say unsurprisingly largely because RHBs are the dominant batter type, as are the RHB-RHB crease combo and you’d be hard-pressed to find teams over the years that do not have a left-arm orthodox bowler in the mix, especially in recent years.

RHB-RHB vs Spin: % Balls Faced vs Strike Rate by Year and Ball Direction in IPL

For the LHB-RHB crease combo, intuitively it makes a lot of sense that half the balls are into the batter and half the balls are away — this is in fact the entire USP of having a left-right batting pair at the crease.

LHB-RHB vs Spin: % Balls Faced vs Strike Rate by Year and Ball Direction in IPL

Removing the year-wise grouping gives us a much cleaner, aggregated plot and an opportunity for me to draw some preliminary conclusions.

Crease Combos vs Spin: % Balls Faced vs Strike Rate by Ball Direction in IPL

1 — The three lowest strike rates are for bowling types that traditionally move the ball away from the respective batter types and vice versa.

2 — LHB-RHB combination works when one of the batters is able to capitalize on their “favourable” matchup. At the same time I’d argue that simply having a left-right pair at the crease isn’t all that — the LHB-RHB awayFromBatter plot point shows that teams (and certain bowlers) can still tie a specific batter down to one end to keep the scoring rates low.

3 — Shoutout to the LHB-LHB combination though — not too far behind the left-right combination when the ball is bowled into the batter (leg break, left arm orthodox) but absolutely terrible vs off-break and chinaman bowling.

There is, however, a drawback to the ball direction classification I’ve used here — and it is one of the reasons I’ve used the word traditionally so much. When you consider mystery bowlers who can genuinely turn the ball both ways (Varun Chakravarthy, Sunil Narine, etc) and “googly” bowlers like Ravi Bishnoi — their bowling type classification (off break for Varun and Narine; leg break for Bishnoi) aren’t always reflective of the direction the ball is going in for the batter.

Varun, Narine amd Bishnoi: % Balls vs Strike Rate by ball direction

See: Bishnoi being the most expensive when the ball is going “away” from the batter, i.e vs RHBs according to my classification, Narine being the least expensive when the ball is going “into” the batter, i.e vs RHBs.

There is also the potential for a detailed piece on how left-right combinations play vs both pace and spin at specific venues — given that not all venues have the same dimensions, and some venues have shorter boundaries to one side, etc — all of which would be interesting to look at. Perhaps another time.

So, what’s the final word on left-right batting pairs? They’re not some silver bullet for spin, but they do force bowlers and captains into uncomfortable spots, especially when one batter cashes in on their matchup. What’s undeniable is how the mere threat of strike rotation with a left-right duo messes with traditional field placements and matchup plans, even if it doesn’t always translate to better strike rates. If you’re building a T20 batting lineup, focus less on obsessively alternating batter hands and more on whether your lefties can genuinely exploit their matchups — otherwise, the left-right trick is just smoke without fire.

TL;DR Left-right pairs don’t magically boost strike rates vs spin but do disrupt bowling plans; prioritize lefties who can punish their matchups over simply alternating stances.