It's difficult to emphasize what a complete statistical outlier Bradman is.
As the parent poster points out, the next highest average is in the low 60s (actually 61.87 now[1]). Looking at the stats though, we see averages are roughly a normal curve, centered on 40 with a standard deviation of a little over 9[2]. This puts Bradman over 6 standard deviations above average!
I'd be surprised if anyone in any large scale sport ever dominated like Bradman or will be as dominant in the future. He missed part of the prime of his career due to WW2, so who knows what could have happened if he'd avoided the interruption.
He's probably not as well known as someone like Gretzky in North America, so his name wouldn't immediately spring to mind on forums like this. In cricket, there just isn't any debate about the greatest - the only area of interest is about who comes next (Viv Richards or Brian Lara in my opinion)
> He's probably not as well known as someone like Gretzky in North America, so his name wouldn't immediately spring to mind on forums like this.
I think you might find there are a fairly large number of Indian, Australian and English people on this forum who will find his name does spring to mind immediately. It's more about the timezone than numbers.
> who comes next (Viv Richards or Brian Lara in my opinion)
Tendulkar.
Viv Richards was amazing at his best but declined badly. Lara's best innings were better than anyone (maybe even Bradman) but he wasn't as consistent and unfortunately he was playing in a declining team.
But I'm old enough to remember his 1993 innings of 277 at the SCG. In some ways that was enough to hold off Australia being undisputably the best team in the world for another couple of years.
He's probably not as well known as someone like Gretzky in North America, so his name wouldn't immediately spring to mind on forums like this. In cricket, there just isn't any debate about the greatest - the only area of interest is about who comes next (Viv Richards or Brian Lara in my opinion)