Monthly Roundup #1: January 2025

Hey, look, another new thing! I’m aping TheZvi and ACX in an attempt to clear out my notebook and help you find the better tennis stuff out there.

It will be a mix of worthwhile links, historical tidbits, and trivia that doesn’t quite merit the full Notebook treatment. There will also be some self/site promotion, partly because it’s my blog and I can do what I want, and also because I regularly find that readers don’t know about features on the site.

As with the Trivia Notebooks, please send me things if you think they belong here.

1. The Match Charting Project has reached 15,000 matches. (And counting!) I still remember getting excited when we reached 100. Now we have 100 matches each for several dozen individual players, not to mention 500-plus for each of the Big Three. Thank you to all contributors.

2. If you’d rather read my analysis in Italian or Spanish, there’s an ever-growing body of translations, too. Edo published Italian versions of my latest pieces on Jannik Sinner and Madison Keys in the last few days, and Ángel recently translated my post from last year on Ugo Humbert and Surface Sensitivity into Spanish. (These two guys are adding to the Match Charting Project totals, too!)

3. New academic paper on serve strategies from Axel Anderson, Jeremy Rosen, John Rust, and Kin-Ping Wong:

Do the world’s best tennis pros play Nash equilibrium mixed strategies? We answer this question using data on serve-direction choices (to the receiver’s left, right, or body) from the Match Charting Project. Using a new approach, we test and reject a key implication of a mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium: that the probability of winning the service game is identical for all possible serve strategies. We calculate best-response serve strategies by dynamic programming (DP) and show that for most elite pro servers, the DP strategy significantly increases their win probability relative to the mixed strategies they actually use.

I haven’t read the paper, partly because I am not optimistic that I would understand it. Still, it is heartening to see a treatment along these lines find that players are not optimizing. Most of the ones I’ve seen tend to conclude that they are, or that they are close.

4. Gill noticed that Frances Tiafoe was the “leader” in aces-against, making him a fun matchup for Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard in Brisbane:

It’s a good reminder that (a) this is a real phenomenon, and (b) you can find it on the TA leaderboards. Tiafoe was indeed the vAce% leader in 2023 as well. His last-52-week rate is up to 13.5%, in part because two of his last five matches were against Mpetshi Perricard. Arthur Rinderknech also posted a 20% ace rate against him in Melbourne, too.

When I say this is “real,” I mean that it’s persistent, not just the year-to-year fluctuations of luck. Some players are better at ace prevention than others. It’s not necessarily a good thing: Returners who get more balls in play win those points at a lower rate, so it can come out in the wash. That said, a remarkable example of the persistence of ace prevention is Gael Monfils. I wrote about the stat all the way back in 2012, and Monfils was then the least aceable player on tour. Thirteen years later, he’s still in the top three.

5. I love finding footage of historical players I’ve never seen before. Here are ten minutes of Julie Heldman (and Billie Jean King) in the 1974 US Open semi-final:

There’s a wealth of historical match footage, but what has survived is (understandably) heavily concentrated on the biggest names, like BJK. A couple more exceptions I’ve come across lately are this 1977 clip of Martina Navratilova against Marise Kruger, and (compare and contrast!) a full match from 1990 of Martina against Halle Cioffi.

6. Hugh gives us a great technical breakdown of Holger Rune:

[H]e’s leaving speed on the table in numerous areas. He could keep the left hand on the throat for longer like Sinner and Alcaraz to coil the torso more, he could lift the hitting elbow higher and invert the racquet without adding the left hand like Berdych, he could flex the elbow more in the setup like Verdasco, or he could simply have a higher takeback but keep the racquet tip up like del Potro. All these solutions add a little more length and would help provide more and smoother racquet speed.

And:

You can’t fire a cannon from a canoe.

7. RIP Rino Tomassi (1934-2025). The Italian journalist covered tennis (and boxing) for well over a half-century. He was also a passionate record-keeper. He is at least indirectly responsible for the fact that Italians are disproportionately represented in pretty much every historical and data-oriented tennis project.

8. Sad to see that we’ve lost Czech coach Jiri Fencl, as well. He was probably best known for his work with Lucie Hradecka, and he even wrote a bit about analytics, in connection with his Resultina app.

9. Giri asks, Has the Tennis Ball Gotten Worse? Tough to say:

As for the guys playing on TV, I wonder if some of the changes in game style they decry have just as much to do with factors beyond the balls, such as the advances in technique or strength and conditioning that enable the likes of Alcaraz and Sinner to hit as big as they do on every single shot. I also wonder if I’d helped to bring their malaise into existence by raising the topic of the ball at all.

It sounds like the ATP, at least, is moving toward more standardization, which is long overdue. However different, worse, or otherwise the balls are, they ought to be the same from one week to the next.

And:

Medvedev and Rublev both seemed to think that “tactics” were gone in men’s tennis, but for nearly opposite reasons: Everybody can rally forever, or nobody can rally for two shots.

I’ll probably have more to say about whether “tactics are dead.”

10. Speaking of footguns, Madison Keys won’t be able to play in next month’s Austin event, as planned:

“With World No. 6 Jessica Pegula already committed to the event, WTA rules prevent us from having a second Top 10 player in the draw. When we entered an agreement with Madison, her ranking was World No. 21. Now with her title wins in both Adelaide and Melbourne, her ranking has moved to World No. 7. As a result of her new ranking, Madison will, unfortunately, not be able to compete in this year’s ATX Open.”

My first reaction was not just that this was idiotic, but that it was nonsensical: Wasn’t the entry list for Austin finalized six weeks before the tourney started? But no, apparently WTA entry lists are settled four weeks before, in this case just after Keys’s ranking boost.

(Also, do I have this right? Had Keys leapfrogged Pegula in the rankings, with both remaining in the top ten, would Pegula have been the one forced out?)

The motivation for the rule is clear: Austin is a 250, and it runs concurrently with a 500 in Merida. The tour wants the best players to compete at the higher-stakes events and, more importantly, to face each other. In general, 250s are getting sidelined on both tours, and this is just one small instance of that. I’m not sure exactly how the rules should be rewritten, but it seems foolish to prevent an American star from appearing in the US in favor of an event elsewhere that is only technically more prominent.

11. James Gray explored Emma Raducanu and Elo rankings, with an assist from me:

But according to one statistical analysis, Raducanu has no reason to fear clashes with top players, and in fact is a good enough player to be seeded, if she can just become consistent enough.

The Elo rankings show she is in fact the 13^th best player in the world right now.

And now 12th, after the Australian … and something worse than that on Monday, once her Singapore loss to Cristina Bucsa (Elo ranking: 138) goes on the books. This was not a good month to use Raducanu as an example of the value of Elo. So, of course, Simon Briggs covered it too.

12. Ahead of the 1919 Wimbledon final, former champion Blanche Hillyard wrote to Dorothea Lambert Chambers, who was set to face Suzanne Lenglen in the Challenge Round:

My rheumatism is too damnable for words. How on earth [Phyllis] Satterthwaite has got to the [all-comers’] final, I don’t know. One of the worst styles of players and I always feel I could have given her ½ 30 in my best days. Well, my dear, again good luck and I do hope you won’t have the ‘curse’. I wish she may have it if she does have it at all?

(“½ 30” referred to handicapping, which was considerably more common back then. A handicap of 15 meant letting the weaker player start every game at 15-0 on serve or 0-15 on return. “½ 30” was halfway between a handicap of 15 and 30, so one point in half of games, two points in the other half. Believe it or not, it gets immensely more complicated from there.)

Hillyard said she’d try to “Evil Eye” the Frenchwoman, but Lenglen won–10-8, 4-6, 9-7–in a match for the ages.

13. At the start of the season, I updated my datasets of rankings, results, and stats for both ATP and WTA. I also updated the dataset of Match Charting Project data.

14. Gill and Ben Ornstein send out weekly editions of The Draw, which is a great resource for finding tennis coverage worth reading. Better than this, for sure.

15. Michal argues that Carlos Alcaraz lost to Novak Djokovic because he was too predictable on second serves:

By completely avoiding the Djokovic forehand return, Alcaraz gives Djokovic an invitation to set up the point however he likes. Djokovic can either step in, and take his backhand return early – made easier by the fact that he can wait in his backhand grip and give up a third of the box. Or, he can back up to get a forehand return anyway – here he can start moving early, while Alcaraz’ ball toss is still in the air, because he knows that the serve will be aimed toward a particular area of the box.

This seems like something a lot of players would let you get away with. Djokovic is not one of those players.

16. Ana gives us the context we need to understand the student protests in Serbia that have prompted Djokovic to speak up:

First, violence against young people—particularly the mass shooting at a Belgrade elementary school (OOS “Vladislav Ribnikar”) in May 2023—has almost certainly contributed to Novak’s new outspokenness. Second, both his age and his parenthood have shaped his thinking: he wants his kids, now 7 and 10 years old, to “also grow up in Serbia,” like he did, but it’s not certain that they will—not merely because they have the resources to live elsewhere but specifically because Serbia may not provide what they need to thrive. Third, while the exodus from Serbia over recent decades (essentially, since the breakup of Yugoslavia) saddens him, he understands it.

17. I probably could have done an entire Trivia Notebook on Gael Monfils’s title in Auckland. He’s awfully old to be winning titles, he’s won 9 of 15 finals (and six of his last seven) after starting his tour-level career 4-16, he beat top-50 opponents in the first two rounds but none in the final three … it was a week of oddities.

The weirdest bit of all how La Monf beat Nishesh Basavareddy in the semi-finals. The score was 7-6(5), 6-4, despite the American outpointing him by one. Most striking is the dominance ratio (DR), the ratio of Monfils’s return points won to his opponent’s return points won. That number was 0.75, low for any victory, let alone a straight-setter. Last year, the lowest DR for a straight-set win was 0.79 (Halys d. Gasquet in Gstaad), and that came from a pair of tiebreaks.

The trick here is that while Basavareddy won a higher rate on return (34% to Gael’s 25%), he had to play a ton of return points: 88 to Gael’s 59. He kept return games close, but couldn’t bunch enough points together to earn a single break. Monfils earned fewer break points, but he converted one.

18. Ravi Ubha asks, What is an Unforced Error?

…Mitchell pointed to probability.

“The speed of the ball coming in, the height of the ball, those things also impact on whether it’s going to be an unforced error or a forced error,” said Mitchell, who estimates he has charted 7500 matches over 30 years. “If it’s a short ball and it is missed, does the player have the ability to make the shot? And if they had the ability to make the shot and missed it, then we can label it as an unforced error.”

Every tennis fan goes through a phase where they discover the limitations of the unforced error stat. (Ravi knows his readership!) Unforced/forced is a simplistic way of looking at a point outcome, and scorers will not always agree.

Probability is the key word here. In a better world, those of us who cared would be able to calculate the chances that a player would miss any shot. Automated systems like Playsight have been doing that for years, even if you can’t see what’s going on internally. The charitable interpretation of “unforced error” is something like, “a shot that a typical tour player would have made more than 60% of the time.” Put in those terms, you might want better stats, but there isn’t anything inherently wrong with what we’ve got.

19. Ben Rothenberg covers the anti-Zverev protest at the Australian Open final:

An aggressive security guard, however, came between us and told me to back away. He told me to stop typing on my phone, and then repeatedly asked me to move further and further away from this woman, continually telling me to move further back meter by meter. He asked me repeatedly to leave the entrance area and return to the seating bowl, but I wanted to keep the woman in my eyeline until I knew what her fate would be. He also photographed my accreditation as well as the accreditation of another journalist who arrived a few minutes later, and reported my presence there to Tennis Australia.

Gross. Not the first time Tennis Australia has overreacted to protest or tried to halt media coverage of it. Apparently it’s only the Happy Slam if you stay in an increasingly narrow lane.

20. Non-tennis, but still sports: Michael Crawley’s book Out of Thin Air, about his time running with elites in Ethiopia, is fantastic. I learned a ton. Here’s an excerpt:

Throughout my time in Ethiopia, in fact, I never heard anyone mention “talent” or “natural ability.” Runners use the word lememed to refer to training as a runner, which literally means “adaptation” or getting used to something. Runners are either good at managing the process of adaptation or they are not. A good runner is most likely to be described as gobez, which means some kind of combination of cleverness and cunning, denoting an ability to plan and manage their training well. As Meseret, a local coach, frequently puts it to the runners, “You can be changed.”

21. I’ll leave you with this 1974 performance of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot from Sonny Rollins and Rufus Harley, the world’s grooviest bagpiper:

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