Previous: January
February did not go as planned here at the blog — illness and the day job intervened. March should be better.
Anyway, here’s this month’s grab bag of links, historical tidbits, and trivia.
1. Newmark dug up the fantastic photo that makes this month’s header. A little research turns up that the picture dates from May 10, 1922, when President and Mrs. Harding invited several players for exhibition matches on the White House lawn. There had been a similar exhibition, including Bill Tilden, a year earlier.
Molla Mallory, then the six-time U.S. champion, was the headliner, but she lost a one-set contest with Marion Zinderstein Jessup. She then partnered Watson Washburn and dropped another set to Jessup and R. Norris Williams. The President stayed for about 90 minutes of tennis, including both of those sets.
2. Not explicitly tennis, but applicable to the sport: Speed thrills: why are so many sports getting faster?
Due to genetic constraints, athletes generally can’t improve their speed as easily as other physical attributes like endurance or strength. This means recruiters are likely to prioritise fast athletes in a spiralling pace race.
Tennis will never be entirely about speed, but speed and quickness make everything else (excepting the serve) easier and more efficient.
3. Last month we celebrated 15,000 matches in the Match Charting Project database. This month we crossed the threshold of nine million shots.
4. Denis Shapovalov beat Taylor Fritz in a deciding-set tiebreak in Dallas. It was his first deciding-set tiebreak win in thirteen tries:
Oddly enough, the 2019 win against Berrettini improved his record at the time to 7-1 at tour-level, 12-2 in all pro matches. It’s tempting (and possibly correct) to look at his recent losing streak and infer that something was going on, but on the other hand, in a decade of pro tennis, Shapo has ended up about even, as most players should be in deciding-set TBs.
5. Congratulations to Simona Halep on a wonderful career. As a long-time fan, I’m choosing to ignore the last couple of years. We’ll probably never know exactly what she took, what she knew, and so on. It would have been great to get another few healthy, uncomplicated seasons, but it was a good run. Simona ranked 93rd on my Tennis 128 list, and as a part of a longer essay, I wrote then:
She remains unclassifiable. Her serve has developed into a weapon as her baseline game has drifted back toward more cautious counterpunching. The New Yorker called her “no one’s idea of a grass court player,” and she hoisted a Wimbledon trophy. Known as something of a choker, she has ascended to the highest peaks of the sport.
6. Again non-tennis, again applicable: I love this visualization from Mike Beuoy:
This is a great way of showing both peak and longevity on the same plot. I’d love to find some ways to represent tennis careers along these lines.
7. Another glorious career comes to an end: Diego Schwartzman is hanging up his racket. He went out in front of the home crowd in Buenos Aires, even winning a match against Nicolas Jarry. There may be no greater outperformer-of-expectations in the history of the sport.
I wrote about Schwartzman for The Economist back in 2017:
Predictably, Mr Schwartzman is weakest on his serve. He hits the lowest share of aces (2.5%) and wins the lowest share of service games (63%) of any top-50 player. He compensates for this with deadly returning. In fact, so potent is El Peque in rallies that if tennis had evolved with an underhand serve—as is the case with badminton—he would probably have become a hallowed occupant of the Hall of Fame. In 2017, coming into the US Open, he had won 44% of his return points, better than anyone else on tour, and just ahead of Mr Nadal, Mr Murray, and Mr Djokovic. Against first serves, he is third best; facing second serves, he once again leads the pack.
The “deadly returning” link goes to a post I wrote the same year, in which I attempted to adjust return points won for the level of competition he faced. That metric made his already-sterling RPW% look even better.
I’m also reminded that, back in 2012, I had some very strong feelings about wild cards. I tried to illustrate how much they matter by comparing Jack Sock–recipient of several free passes as the then-golden boy of American tennis–to the unfavored Argentinian:
It’s an open question whether Sock or Schwartzman had the more impressive year. Some might prefer the American’s challenger title and handful of top-100 scalps; others would prefer Schwartzman’s 30-match winning streak at the Futures level.
But here’s the kicker: While Sock made $137,000 and raised his ranking to #164, Schwartzman made $17,000 and is currently ranked #245. By showing up at the Indian Wells Masters and losing in the first round, Sock made about as much money as Schwartzman did by winning six tournaments.
Schwartzman won in the end, and not just because he doesn’t play pickleball.
8. Mirra Andreeva’s Dubai title moved her up to 4th in the Elo ratings:
Adam pointed out a quirk of the top four: Sabalenka is three years older than Swiatek, who is three years older than Gauff, who is three years older than Mirra. And Madison Keys is three years older Sabalenka.
9. Speaking of Keys, here’s something I forgot to include last month. By saving match point against Swiatek in the Australian Open semis, she joined the short list of women who had come from the brink to win a major title. Only two players did so in the first three decades of the Open era, though it has become more common since.
My favorite entry on the list is Muriel Robb, who won the 1902 Wimbledon final in straight sets, yet saved a match point to do so:
1902: [WIMBLEDON] Muriel Robb d. Charlotte Sterry 7-5 6-1 in the Challenge Round. The previous day, the match had been interrupted at 4-6 13-11, after Robb saved mp when Sterry led 6-4 5-4 40-30. The match was replayed from the beginning.
10. The best match video I came across this month: Andy Murray and Arnaud Clement at the 2005 US Open:
11. How to quantify the gap between Jannik Sinner and… you?
This is fascinating. The Elo-rating gap that implies a 90% chance of winning is about 390 points. So Sinner has a 90% chance of beating #15 Gael Monfils, who has a 90% chance of beating #228 Coleman Wong, who has a 90% chance of beating #483 Leonardo Aboian. My Elo ratings only consider Challengers and Challenger qualifying, so I can’t go beyond that, and guys like Aboian may not be properly rated.
Still, that’s three levels between Sinner and a guy who has won some ITF titles. There’s at least one more level to the bottom of the pro ranks, maybe two.
After that, it gets tougher to measure. UTR could probably help us here. It also depends on how you define “weekend” tennis player. My gut reaction is that Agustin’s estimate of 12 levels is a bit too high, but 9 or 10 seems reasonable. I might just be thinking in terms of a stronger “weekend” player. Either way, the broader point holds, that the range between a recreational player and the world’s best tells us something about the sport–both its age and how compelling it is to play and watch.
12. Steve Tignor revisits Arthur Ashe’s 1975 Wimbledon victory:
To say that Jimmy Connors was the overwhelming favorite coming into Wimbledon in 1975 was an understatement. The 22-year-old was the defending champion and ranked No. 1, and he was playing with a viciousness unseen before in this previously polite sport. In 1974, he had gone 99-4, and there was talk, even among his rivals, of how he would “go on winning everything for years.”
A few years ago I wrote about the same match, evaluating Ashe’s post-match claim that Connors had choked. He probably didn’t, at least not the way Arthur thought he did.
13. From my email, Samuel writes:
Hitting a great “first serve” is like having a great fastball. If that is all you have and all you hit, you won’t last long. I’d be interested to see what would happen if someone truly approached serving like pitching and threw out the old way of thinking in terms of two speeds/serves.
I am always here for tennis-baseball comparisons. I think there are various reasons why tennis serving is less about variety:
a. For kids and rec players, serving consistently is hard. That’s enough of a hurdle for most people.
b. Even for much better players, disguising intentions is a challenge. A pitcher can move a (concealed) finger or two, twist their wrist a bit differently, and throw a breaking pitch. For all but the best servers, mixing things up means tossing in a different place and/or using a different service motion–both things that are visible to an attentive returner.
c. There’s much less value in “offspeed” serving than in pitching. A baseball changeup functions broadly like a curveball: It upsets the batter’s expectations and he swings over it. That might be a swing-and-a-miss, or it might mean weak contact. But the analogy doesn’t hold in tennis, because rackets are so much more forgiving than baseball bats. Miss the sweet spot by a fraction of an inch, and you can still get the ball back in play. And then, if the offspeed serve isn’t well-disguised, it’s just mediocre. And we know what happens to mediocre serves in 2025.
That said, pros do think in terms of a range of serves, even if it doesn’t rival, say, the pitch arsenal of Yu Darvish. With a much wider target, placement trumps movement. The very best servers–think Federer or Barty–can overcome (b) and (c) and do pretty much whatever they want.
I suspect that the next big shift in serving strategy will be about a different sort of variety: risk levels. The math doesn’t recommend “two first serves,” but it does suggest that players should take more chances with second serves and accept more double faults. I’ll have more about that in an upcoming post.
14. In my notes, I have reminders to mention Jannik Sinner’s suspension, the the evisceration of US Open mixed doubles, and the potential switch of the Golden Swing to hard courts–or its eventual disappearance in favor of a Saudi Masters.
But… you probably know about these things. I can’t get myself too worked up about any of them. In a few months, Sinner will be back, he’ll win lots of matches, and we’ll all mostly forget this ever happened. The purist in me hates the new exhibition-style US Open mixed, but honestly, was I going to watch any of it either way? (Were you?) And as for the Golden Swing: It will continue to struggle, given its spot on the calendar and its geographical position in a Europe-dominated sport. The rise of Joao Fonseca will save it, for now.
15. RIP Gene Hackman. Hoosiers is the best sports movie ever made. How did Hackman end up in Young Frankenstein? Tennis, of course:
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