Sachin Tendulkar, among the greatest cricketers the world has ever seen, has decided to retire from one-day-international cricket. Here are three graphs that show why he was by far the greatest batsman in the format:

Nobody comes even close to Tendulkar’s 49 centuries in ODI cricket. The 19 centuries that separate Tendulkar and second placed Ponting are more centuries than legends such as JH Kallis, AC Gilchrist, and ME Waugh have scored in their entire careers.

And lest one think that this is because Tendulkar has played more matches than any other player, here are the same batsman sorted by the average number of innings it took them to score a century:

Tendulkar scored one about every nine matches. There’s just no comparison.

Ultimately though, cricket is about runs:

Tendulkar has scored 34% more runs than the person who’s scored the second greatest amount of runs in ODI cricket. He has scored 13.5% of all one day runs that have been scored by India in ODIs since his debut, and, in fact, Tendulkar is responsible for scoring 1.6% of all ODI runs that have been scored by all players since he made his debut.

Tendulkar’s numbers show that in ODI cricket, not only was he the greatest, he was in a league of his own. There existed no other player of his caliber.

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