Italian translation at settesei.it
Now this is a milestone. Last night, The Match Charting Project–my volunteer-driven effort to collect shot-by-shot logs of professional tennis–posted it’s 5,000th match! The magic-numbered chart was of one of last weekend’s Davis Cup Qualifiers matches, between Robin Haase and Lukas Rosol, charted by Zindaras, who just began contributing to the project. Number 5,001 is already up–a log of Sunday’s Hua Hin final between Dayana Yastremska and Ajla Tomljanovic.
MCP charts reveal data that simply isn’t available anywhere else. We track every shot–its type and direction–as well as the direction of every serve and and the depth of every return. All told, we’ve amassed these records for over 770,000 points, and almost 3 million shots. (At time of writing, we’re just over 2,992,000.) The dataset has made possible all kinds of research projects, like my recent Economist post about anti-Novak Djokovic tactics, an attempt to quantify the value of smashes, an evaluation of Kei Nishikori’s unusual return stance, and a look at the evolution of Juan Martin del Potro’s backhand.
When I launched the project in 2013, I never imagined we would amass so much information. My goal then was depth, not breadth. Now we have both. The 100 or so charters who have contributed to the project have combined to log nearly every grand slam final back to 1980, most ATP Masters finals back to 1990, and an increasing number of grand slam semi-finals and WTA Premier title matches. More recently, we’ve covered every tour-level final in 2018 and 2019, every head-to-head meeting between members of the big four, and nearly every final contested by any of the big four.
5,000 is a lot
The breadth of the available data goes beyond those high-profile matches. We have at least one charted match for nearly 1,100 different players, at least 10 matches for 268 players, 20 or more for 117 players, 50-plus for 33 players, and over 100 matches for 11 different players. It’s increasingly possible to use MCP data to track the evolution of individual players, something I assumed would always fall outside the scope of the project. And unlike many sports analytics initiatives, this one is gender balanced. Women’s matches make up 47% of the total, despite the fact that vintage women’s matches are considerably harder to track down. (To say nothing of more recent difficulties with WTA streaming.)
It’s fitting that the 5,000th match was logged by a new contributor, because the first several weeks of 2019 have been one of the best periods in the project’s history both for the number of charters and the volume of matches logged. We’ve already charted more than 150 matches from the 2019 season alone, including 79 from the Australian Open. Spearheading that effort has been another new charter, tsitsi, who has contributed more than 100 matches since joining up about a month ago.
Thanks are in order for everyone who has contributed to the project. About 100 people have charted matches, and some of them have been truly prolific. Edo has logged 661 matches, including many of the grand slam finals and semi-finals. In addition to Edo and tsitsi, eight more charters have been responsible for at least 50 matches apiece: Isaac, Lowell, ChapelHeel66, Edged, Palaver, Salvo, 1HandBH, and DebLDecker.
The next 5,000
I hope you’ll join us. Here’s my “quick start” guide to charting, along with 11 reasons to give it a go. Tennis is a complicated sport, so there’s a bit of a learning curve, but I think it’s worth the investment.
Even if you’re still on the fence about charting yourself, I encourage all fans to take greater advantage of the data on offer. A single chart, like this one of the Australian Open men’s final, contains thousands of data points describing various aspects of the match. What I find most illuminating is to compare those single-match numbers with tour, surface, and player averages. For most of the stats on each page, you can move your cursor over the number and see all of those averages. You can also find the player-specific averages on pages like this one, for Petra Kvitova. Researchers can dig into a significant chunk of the raw data, here.
My goal with Tennis Abstract, the blog, and the Match Charting Project has always been to get smarter about tennis–to better understand what’s really happening on court, and never to take the conventional wisdom at face value. I’d say we’re making progress.