Event History Pages at Tennis Abstract

If you like tennis records and trivia, you’d better clear your calendar. I knew I was on to something when I kept getting distracted from my own project by all the cool stats it was spitting out.

The project: Event history pages at TennisAbstract.com. Think of them as almanacs for every stop on the ATP tour. For each tournament, you’ll find a chronological list of winners, finalists, and final scores. Then come the leaderboards–132 of them per tournament, at last count. That’s where the fun really begins.

In addition to the basics, like most matches won, most quarterfinal appearances, and the like, you’ll find tiebreak records, bagel records, the youngest titlists (and finalists, and more), the oldest titlists (and finalists, and more), and the lowest ranked titlists, finalists, and semifinalists.

Then come the match-level stats records (all links head to the Washington event’s page as an example). These are broken down into four categories:

• Single-match records (combined): Longest and shortest matches, most aces, most breaks of serve, longest tiebreaks, and much more.
• Single-match player records: Most aces by a single player, highest and lowest first-serve percentage, highest and lowest first-serve winning percentage, most break points earned and saved, and lots more.
• Single-tournament player records: Marks set by players at a single year’s event, including most time spent on court, most points won, highest rate of points won, aces, double faults … you get the idea.
• Event player records: Best all-time performances at the tournament over multiple years, including most of the same stat categories from the other sections.

Player names are linked to each guy’s own page, and years are linked to a page with each individual tournament’s results.

The links above all go to the Washington tournament’s page. Here are links to this week’s ATP events:

• Atlanta
• Gstaad
• Umag

(I’d love to have equivalent WTA pages, and I hope to add them soon. It’ll take quite a bit more work, however, and without the 24-year history of matchstats that is available for ATP events, the resulting pages will be much less thorough.)

While I’ve put a ton of work into these this week, you’ll still probably some bugs. That’s one of the downsides of leaderboards–they have a knack for uncovering mistakes in the database. I’ve been able to add several checks to the process to avoid matches with obviously incorrect stats (e.g. impossibly short match durations), but I’m sure we’ll keep discovering more.

Enjoy!