How is a cricketer’s batting average calculated?

In cricket, a player’s batting average is the total number of runs he has scored divided by the number of times he has been out. Since the number of runs a player scores and how often he gets out are primarily measures of his playing ability, and largely independent of his team mates, the batting average is a good statistic to describe an individual player’s skill as a batsman. The number is also simple to interpret intuitively, being approximately the average number of runs the batsman scores per innings.