Around the Net is my attempt to provide a clearinghouse for tennis analytics on the web. Each week, you’ll find a summary of recent articles, podcasts, papers, and data sources, as well as trivia and the occasional bit of interesting non-tennis content. If you would like to suggest something for a future issue, drop me a line.
Articles
- WTA Head-to-Head Effects (on-the-t.com)
Multimedia
Data
- Match Charting Project: The dataset has grown by 50 matches in the last week, from 5,326 to 5,376. New additions include several WTA Miami finals, including the Venus-vs-Serena showdown of 1999, many more current contests from Indian Wells and Miami, and a handful of historic highlights, including the 1973 Wimbledon women’s final and the 2008 Olympics women’s final.
Trivia
- We’re still waiting for our first multiple-title winner of the 2019 season. On the ATP side, that’s 19 champions in 19 events, a new record.
- The player to break that streak will not be Dominic Thiem, who lost his first match in Miami against Hubert Hurkacz. Thiem is the first Indian Wells titlist to fail to win a Miami match since 2010, when Ivan Ljubicic lost to Benjamin Becker. It’s not bad company for Thiem, though, as the other three IW champions to lose their first match in Miami are Novak Djokovic, Lleyton Hewitt, and Alex Corretja.
- Conceivably, the man who breaks the unique-titlist streak could be Reilly Opelka, who beat Diego Schwartzman despite being out-aced by El Pique in the first set. Opelka didn’t record a single ace in the first set, and it was only his second tour-level match in which less than 10% of his service points went for aces. (The other was his 2017 first-round encounter with Tommy Haas in Houston, and his career rate is 22.3%.)
- Kei Nishikori is king of deciding sets no more. After dropping a third set to Dusan Lajovic in his first outing in Miami, he loses the top spot on the deciding-set winning percentage leaderboard, to Djokovic.
- Yesterday, Naomi Osaka won the first set against Su-Wei Hsieh, but Hsieh came back to win the match. It’s the first time since 2016 that Osaka failed to convert a one-set advantage, a streak I wrote about a couple of months ago. She fell only 156 matches short of Chris Evert’s record.
Beyond the net
- Baseball’s new frontier: Inside the looming battle between players and teams over the new data (theathletic.com)
- The story of HockeyDB: ‘It sort of changed the world’ (theathletic.com)
- Fantasy Birding Is Real, And It’s Spectacular (deadspin.com)
- On Transgender athletes and performance advantages (sportsscientists.com)
Thanks to Peter for help with this week’s issue.