In 2016-17, the men of the Big Bash League (BBL) scored 1.92 more runs per over than the women of the WBBL. By 2025-26 that gap had shrunk to 0.64. This report follows every ball bowled in both leagues to show where the women caught up, and how.

Every chart is interactive. Hover over any point or tile for exact numbers, click a legend item to hide or show it, and drag to zoom (double click to reset).

1. The women have closed two thirds of the gap

Since 2016-17, the men’s run rate has only edged up 3%, while the women’s has jumped 24%. That is why the shaded gap keeps getting thinner. The latest WBBL season (7.98 runs per over) was faster than 5 of the 15 BBL seasons ever played.

Source: Cricsheet (2026), BBL and WBBL ball-by-ball data. Run rate = total runs per six legal balls. Super overs excluded.

2. The middle overs are where the WBBL changed most

Splitting each innings into the powerplay, middle and death overs shows where the extra runs came from. In the WBBL, the middle overs gained the most (+1.67 runs per over since 2016-17). The tiles turning from dark purple to green show batters no longer treating overs 7 to 15 as a quiet period. The BBL’s biggest gain was also in the middle overs.

Source: Cricsheet (2026), BBL and WBBL ball-by-ball data. Both leagues share one colour scale so they can be compared directly. Blank tiles are seasons before the WBBL data begins.

3. More boundaries, fewer dots

Each bubble is one team in one season. Teams up and to the left hit more boundaries and faced fewer dot balls. Press Play to watch the seasons go by. The orange WBBL bubbles start in the bottom right and drift into the space the blue BBL bubbles occupy. In 2025-26, the WBBL’s boundary rate (17.2% of balls) matched the BBL’s (17%). The difference that remains is mostly dot balls (37.1% against 34.5%).

Source: Cricsheet (2026), BBL and WBBL ball-by-ball data and match results. Boundary and dot percentages are of legal balls faced by that team.

4. Melbourne’s two clubs tell different stories

How do the two Melbourne clubs compare with the rest of their league? Above the zero line means the team scored faster than the league average that season. The Renegades men have been below average in every one of their 8 seasons since 2018-19, including the year they won the title batting 0.41 runs per over slower than average. On the women’s side, both clubs swing above and below the line from year to year.

Source: Cricsheet (2026), BBL and WBBL ball-by-ball data. League average is the run rate of all teams in that league and season.

5. Explore your own team

Use the filters to pick a team, a league or a range of seasons. The chart and the table are linked, so filtering one updates both. Click a point to highlight it and double click to clear.

Source: Cricsheet (2026), BBL and WBBL ball-by-ball data and match results.

What this means

The WBBL is not a slower copy of the BBL anymore. The women have closed most of the scoring gap, and they did it mainly by hitting more boundaries through the middle overs. What still separates the two leagues is the number of dot balls, which suggests the next step for WBBL batters is rotating the strike, not hitting harder. If the trend of the last ten seasons continues, the two leagues could be scoring at close to the same rate within a few summers.

Technical notes

Data. Ball-by-ball CSV files for every BBL and WBBL match available on Cricsheet were downloaded and combined in a separate script (prep_data.R). Super overs were removed. A legal ball is any delivery that is not a wide or a no ball. Run rate is total runs (including extras) per six legal balls. Boundary % and dot % are shares of legal balls. Phases are overs 1 to 6 (powerplay), 7 to 15 (middle) and 16 to 20 (death). Seasons with fewer than 20 matches in the data were left out so a partial season cannot distort the trend, which is why the WBBL starts in 2016-17. Match winners come from the Cricsheet match info files. Washed out matches with no balls bowled do not appear.

Design. Colours follow the Okabe-Ito palette (Okabe & Ito, 2008) and the heatmap uses the viridis scale, both of which stay readable for common types of colour blindness. League colour is kept the same across charts. Charts were built with ggplot2 and converted to interactive charts with plotly. The explorer uses crosstalk to link the filters, chart and table.

Acknowledgements

Match data is from Cricsheet and is used under the Open Data Commons Attribution License. The data was aggregated into summary tables for this report. This report was built with R and the packages listed in the references.

I acknowledge the use of Claude (Anthropic, 2026) for editorial assistance in reviewing spelling, grammar, and written clarity, as well as technical guidance regarding R package syntax and troubleshooting web-hosting deployment issues; all analytical concepts, data transformations, visualization designs, and interpretations were independently directed and verified by the author.

References

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Cricsheet. (2026). Big Bash League and Women’s Big Bash League ball-by-ball match data [Data set]. https://cricsheet.org/downloads/

Okabe, M., & Ito, K. (2008). Color universal design (CUD): How to make figures and presentations that are friendly to colorblind people. J*Fly. https://jfly.uni-koeln.de/color/

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