Italian translation at settesei.it
So far, the serve clock has not made matches faster. In my article for The Economist earlier this week, I showed that in the handful of tournaments played with the new technology thus far, players took longer to play each point than they did at the same events last year.
That article included data from San Jose, Washington, Toronto, and Montreal. Last week, the combined Masters/Premier event in Cincinnati gave us another several dozen matches, with a slightly different mix of players, to further test how the serve clock is affecting the speed of play. Given another week of experience with the visible timers, the pace of play remains slower than it was one year ago.
In the Cincinnati men’s event, players used 41.2 seconds per point this year, compared to 39.8 seconds per point last year. In the women’s draw, it was 40.8 seconds per point this year, up from 40.2 seconds per point last year. Both increases are roughly the average change that we saw in the tournaments of the two previous weeks. Here is a breakdown of the time per point at each event, where “S/P” means seconds per point. Also shown are tour and overall averages, weighted by the number of matches at each event:
M/W Tournament 2017 S/P 2018 S/P Change
Men Cincinnati 39.8 41.2 +1.4
Men Canada 40.2 41.4 +1.2
Men Washington 40.3 42.2 +1.9
Women Cincinnati 40.2 40.8 +0.6
Women Canada 40.7 41.8 +1.1
Women Washington 40.2 41.6 +1.4
Women San Jose 40.3 40.7 +0.4
Men Average 40.1 41.6 +1.5
Women Average 40.4 41.2 +0.8
Overall Average 40.2 41.4 +1.2
* alert readers might notice small discrepancies between these figures and those cited in the Economist, which are due to rounding errors.
Several readers have commented on the imprecision of this measurement. (I did too, in the original post.) Short of taking a stopwatch to every single match, there’s no way of auditing umpires by collecting the exact length of time between each pair of points. The exact mix of players in any given draw can affect the overall measurements–I experimented with a simple model to control for players, but it presented more problems than it solved. I agree, this is far from the final word on the serve clock, even apart from the fact that the way that umpires use it will probably evolve.
Still, these numbers point in only one direction. A similar survey of unaffected tournaments confirms that 2018 is not slower in general: For instance, of the men’s and women’s draws in Indian Wells, Miami, and Madrid this year, four of the six brackets decreased in average time per point, and one of the others increased by only 0.1 seconds per point.
Also, it’s important to remember that one presumed goal of the clock is to speed up play, not simply keep it steady. If time per point were staying roughly the same as last year, that itself would indicate that the new technology isn’t living up to its billing. That seven out of seven events have all gotten slower allows us to make an even stronger claim.
Fortunately for the tours, there is plenty of room for the use of the clock to evolve. The most glaring example is the umpiring practice of waiting until crowd noise dies down to start the clock. Yes, players can’t be expected to serve in a noisy stadium, but the cheering usually stops after ten seconds or so. Rather than add that ten seconds to the time allotment between points, umpires should start the clock immediately and then, on the rare occasions when the crowd remains disruptive, pause as necessary.
Its unlikely that matches will still be slower when the serve-clock dust has settled. But the goalposts have moved: At this stage of the process, it would be progress if matches with visible timers were simply the same speed as the ones that came before.