India, Sept. 16 -- There are IPL seasons remembered through mountains of runs, 25-wicket campaigns and awards collected at the end of a tournament. This was not one of them. The numbers beside one Rajasthan Royals all-rounder in 2009 looked almost ordinary: 243 runs, seven wickets and a team that failed to defend its title.

Yet hidden underneath those numbers was something extraordinary. Rajasthan had spent $475,000 on him at the inaugural IPL auction, approximately Rs.1.9 crore at the exchange rate prevailing at the time, and a ball-by-ball reconstruction of his 2009 campaign using our IPL valuation model suggests that investment produced close to Rs.17 crore in cricketing value.

More remarkably, there were two evenings when he appears...