Harebrained schemes – Heavy Topspin

The Underhand Serve: When and Why?

An underhand serve functions in two ways–one short term, one long term. The short-term goal is to win a single point. Your opponent is standing way back, and the service equivalent of a drop shot could go for a 50 mile-per-hour ace. The long-term goal is to give your opponent something to worry about, perhaps distracting him or changing his return position for games, or sets to come. It’s not about winning a single point, but about slightly improving your odds in many future points.

In his second-round match yesterday against Ugo Humbert at the Australian Open, Nick Kyrgios opted for both. He unleashed the underhander twice, once at 40-love in his second service game, and again at 5-5, 40-30 in the fourth set.

The first dropper was on as meaningless a point as he could ask for. Kyrgios’s probability of winning a service game from 40-love is about 99.6% (really!), so the risk of losing the game after throwing away a point is essentially nil. He won the point with a backhand winner on his next shot, but the object of the exercise–assuming there was a tactical one, and I’ll give Nick the benefit of the doubt here–was more long-term oriented.

He delivered the second underarm serve on a much higher-pressure point. Kyrgios is still heavily favored to hold serve from 40-30, but he could be forgiven for feeling some nerves and wishing for a free point. This time he netted the underhand attempt and ended up winning the point after a (conventional) second serve.

A drop of data

When the underhand serve first started to go mainstream a couple of years ago, I updated the Match Charting Project spreadsheet to allow us to track these attempts. Counting the Kyrgios-Humbert match, we’ve now gathered the results of 35 drop-serve attempts across 20 different men’s matches. (We’ve recorded many women’s underhand serves as well, but most of those belong to Sara Errani, who has a different set of goals when she goes that route.)

35 points is awfully far from big data, but it is enough to get a taste of how a handful of players are deploying this unorthodox weapon.

The most common point score for an underarm serve is 40-love. Of the 35 attempts, 40-love accounts for 12 of them. Another 4 occured at 40-15, plus two more at 30-love, so roughly half of the recorded drop serves came with a service game more or less secured. A few of the remaining points were also relatively unimportant ones, like Daniil Medvedev’s underhander at love-40 toward the end of a 2019 US Open match against Hugo Dellien, and Alexander Bublik’s back-to-back tries at 0-5 and 1-5 in a tiebreak against John Isner.

Bublik is the major source of unimportant-point underarm serving. He’s responsible for 19 of the recorded points, 16 of which were at 40-love, 40-15, 30-love, or those two tiebreak points I just mentioned.

Inferring tactics

Since so many underarm serves are deployed at low-pressure moments, it’s tempting to conclude that players are thinking long term.

On the other hand, our handful of recorded underhand deliveries–even the ones on 40-love points–don’t skew toward the beginning of matches. We have two charted matches in which Robin Haase tried an underhander: a 2019 Budapest tilt against Borna Coric in which he made his first attempt in the third game, and a 2020 Davis Cup rubber when he waited until the 32nd game of the match.

Poster boy Bublik is inconsistent on this as well. Twice he has brought out the underhander in his second service game–once in the Newport match versus Isner, and another time the same summer in Washington against Bradley Klahn. Yet at the US Open against Thomas Fabbiano the same year, he didn’t unleash the secret weapon until 40-love in the 32nd game of the match.

I’ll admit, it might be foolish to try to detect the grand plan underlying the behavior of Alexander Bublik.

But it works!

Yeah, our 35 points make up tiny sample, but… the server won 27 of these 35 points! That’s 77%, and it includes underarm first-serve attempts that missed. When players had to hit a conventional second serve, they still won 7 of 10 points–a rate of second serve points won that any player would happily accept.

These numbers–cautiously as we must treat them–suggest that the underarm serve trend has plenty of room to run. The rare players who dare to risk ridicule are still only using the drop serve less than twice per match, and of course the vast majority of men on tour are never hitting them at all. The more common the underhand delivery becomes, the less effective it will be, but there’s a lot of space between the current drop-serve win percentage of 77% and the typical player’s success rate on serve. Tour average is around 65%, and only the most dominant servers exceed 70%.

As Bublik and friends have discovered, there’s little risk in mixing things up. Strong servers like him and Kyrgios have plenty of low-leverage opportunities to remind their opponents that surprises could be in store later in the match, when the stakes are raised. Our very early indicators suggest that where Kyrgios has gone, the rest of the tour could profitably follow.

Cool Down Tennis

This is a guest post by Carl Bialik.

Imagine you’re named boss of tennis. Right after being sworn in by Rod Laver and Martina Navratilova, you’re handed an empty wall calendar. You make the schedule for 2018. What’s your first move?

Mine would be to move Indian Wells and Miami earlier in the calendar, and the Australian Open later, after the two U.S. Masters tournaments.

I never wanted this more than while sweating my way around the Indian Wells grounds in search of shade last month. I wasn’t alone. The only full sections of the main stadium during day sessions were the ones protected from the sun. Around the fan-friendly venue, there are plenty of seats in the shade — under tents, or in Adirondack chairs that shade-seeking people push ever closer to the screen as the sun shifts. The players can only wait for shade to slowly descend on the court. Jack Sock needed a towel holding 50 ice cubes to cool down.

Sure, it was unusually hot at this year’s Indian Wells tournament. But the climatological averages are clear: It’s hot in the California desert and in the Florida sunshine in March, and in the antipodean summer in January. It’d be cooler in Indian Wells, Miami and Melbourne if the two Masters events moved two months earlier and led up to the year’s first Grand Slam in March. Each of the two-week events would be, on average, 4 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler each year. (The precipitation would be about the same, so Miami men’s finalist Rafael Nadal might continue to bemoan humidity, request sawdust and show more than he’d planned beneath his shorts; while women’s champ Johanna Konta might keep having to change clothes midmatch because they’ve accumulated approximately five kilograms of sweat.)

I’m using the averages because I don’t want to make too much of an unseasonably hot Indian Wells, or too little of an unusually cold March in Miami. But the averages might understate the problem because it’s precisely the outliers we’re worried about. A nudge downward of a few degrees, on average, could translate into a big drop in the probability of an unbearably hot fortnight — say, from 25 percent to 5 percent.

Changing the tennis calendar would also mean less daylight. That wouldn’t be so good for the nickname Sunshine Double, but it’d be good for tennis. Until more tennis stadiums adopt overhanging partial roofs — but for sun, not for rain — shorter days means less sun for fans to contend with and more reason to fill the seats. Plus, night tennis is exciting. The venues already have plenty of lights and evening sessions.

Scrambling the schedule would do more than cool down tennis. The three midyear majors’ proximity to each other helps the sport carry some momentum and mainstream buzz from one to the next. The Australian Open squanders all that in the four-month gap between its end and the start of the French Open. There’s even a month between the Aussie Open and the next big event.

The other three majors also get opening acts, to help players build up familiarity with the surface and for fans to build anticipation. The Australian Open gets two weeks at the start of the season — without so much as a 500 event on the men’s side.

The lack of buffer between the offseason and Melbourne also means it loses some players still recovering from the end of the previous season. That was the case this year with Juan Martin del Potro, who skipped this year’s first major after winning the Davis Cup with Argentina in November.

Imagine instead starting the season with Indian Wells and Miami — or Miami, then Indian Wells, while we’re scrambling things, for the convenience of travel from the sport’s power center of Europe — using the same courts and balls as Melbourne. Follow that month — or less, if one or both of the U.S. early-year Masters succumbs to the reality that they could be just a week — by Doha and Dubai, then Brisbane, Sydney and the like, before the main event in Melbourne at the start of March. We’d start the season with a real hard-court swing, ending with the first major.

From Australia, the tour could stay in the southern hemisphere. The swing through South America has a long history and a terrible spot on the current calendar. It was traditionally played on clay but some of its biggest events are moving to hard courts — first (North American) Acapulco, now, maybe, Rio, in search of Masters status — to the chagrin of Nadal and others. Too many players simply don’t think it’s worth it to compete on clay for a few weeks if that’s followed by a month of hard-court events. But move Indian Wells and Miami, and South American clay could move a month later in the calendar — while slightly tempering what Nadal bemoans as “too extreme” weather conditions by an average of 1 degree. The swing would give way seamlessly to Houston, Charleston and the European clay spell — which, by the way, would absorb Bucharest, Hamburg, Umag, Bastad and Gstaad from their awkward post-Wimbledon calendar slots. And no one would suggest Miami move to green clay.

We’d be left with a coherent calendar with five seasons of roughly equal length and importance, four with a major and one with the year-end finals: (1) Outdoor hard courts in the U.S., the Middle East and Oceania, followed by (2) clay in the Americas and Europe, (3) English and German grass (with Newport for those who want to visit the sport’s hall of fame), (4) North American and Asian outdoor hard courts, and (5) European indoor hard courts (absorbing the current winter events such as St. Petersburg and Rotterdam) culminating in wherever the tours’ multiplying year-end finals are calling home that year. And let’s play Davis Cup and Fed Cup at the same time — the tours acting in sync; what a concept! — on weekends at the edge of the five new seasons, giving hosts a wider range of sensible surfaces to choose from, and creating the option for combined venues if men and women from the same country are hosting the same round. (Prague in 2012 would’ve been tennis nirvana.) Or, hell, consider merging the events.

Could all this happen? Sure — if tennis power were centralized in a person or people who prioritize the overall good of the global game. Without a radical transformation of tennis, though, it’ll be slow going: It took years for the idea of lengthening the grass-court season by a week to become reality.

Carl Bialik has written about tennis for fivethirtyeight.com and The Wall Street Journal. He lives and plays tennis in New York City and has a Tennis Abstract page.

The Untapped Potential of Umpire Scorecard Data

There’s a lot more that can be done with tennis data. Everyone knows this. Even the ATP and WTA tours–along with their rather prominent partners–know this.

Both tours are sitting on a mountain of information that they’ve barely exploited: umpire scorecard data. It’s not cutting edge–there are no cameras, no courtside loggers counting unforced errors and winners. It’s just a log of every point, along with first or second serve, aces, and double faults. Despite those limits, there are many untapped advantages.

First: There’s an umpire scorecard for every match. Not every match on a TV court, not every match on a Hawkeye court, not every main draw match. Every match. If a ATP, WTA, or ITF umpire is officiating the match, to the best of my knowledge, there is a scorecard–when you see a chair umpire tap on a screen, this is what they’re recording. That means data on thousands of matches and players every year, from Novak Djokovic to Djordje Djokovic.

It’s tough to overstate how valuable that is. The main drawback of most tennis stats is context. For instance, when Hawkeye puts a graphic on your TV screen, it’s often based on data from a single match or the present tournament. IBM’s much-publicized analytics are based on Grand Slam matches only. Umpire scorecards have no such problem.

Second, there’s a ton of information lurking in this low-tech tracking system. The basics of first and second serves, aces, and double faults may not sound like much, but as we’ll see below, they open the door to a huge array of stats. ATP and WTA “Match Stats” are compiled from these scorecards, but they only scratch the surface.

How to do more with scorecards

In a minute, I’ll make specific suggestions for additional totals and rates that the tours could compile from the data they already have. Before that, let me explain why simply expanding the contents of “Match Stats” should be Plan B.

More and more journalism is data-based, and more and more avid fans are, to some extent or other, analyzing tennis for publication. In other words, there is a rapidly growing base of analysts who don’t need data pre-packaged for them. Every match is different, and the numbers needed to illustrate any match report are different as well. For broader analysis, like comparing players over the course of a season, the need for customized data is more important still.

So: Release the point-by-point data from the scorecards.

Another benefit of the simplicity of umpire scorecard data is that more analysts can easily manage it. No organization could foresee everything that might be interesting about a match, so why even try? Not every journalist will want to dig into a point-by-point spreadsheet to see how often Julien Benneteau missed his first serve of a game, or how Rafael Nadal responded every time he fell behind 0-30. But some will do just that. When they do, their work benefits, their readers have more ways to engage with the next match they watch, and the sport ultimately wins.

A not-so-brief wish list

I have a sneaking feeling that no one’s going to release point-by-point data for every ATP or WTA match. I hope that’s not the case, but if it is, the tours should still consider vastly expanding the stats they compile for each match–including past matches for as far back as their databases go.

Deuce/ad comparisons. Some players serve much more effectively in one than the other. For all deuce-court service points, I would like: (a) total points, (b) aces, (c) double faults, and (d) first serves in. Same for ad-court service points.
Break point stats. Same as the above: For both servers facing break point: (a) aces, (b) double faults, and (c) first serves in.
Break point games. In how many games did each player earn a break point?
Stats for other important point scores. Break points are key, but other scenarios are important as well. If I have to pick only a few, let’s start with 0-30, 15-30, deuce, and ad-in (including 40-30). For all service points at each of those scores, I’d like (a) total points, (b) aces, (c) double faults, and (d) first serves in.
Set points and match points: Same as above. Fans love match point stats.
The game sequence–at what points did breaks of serve occur? This would allow us to answer many oft-posed questions: Do players hold serve more early in sets? Do breaks of serve more frequently follow breaks than holds? (And if so, how much more often?) Are players more like to drop serve immediately after winning a tight set?
Set-by-set breakdowns of all stats that are currently kept, plus all of the above. The live scoring app separates stats by set, but there is no official archive with set-by-set breakdowns. This is particularly key for journalists attempting to tell the story of a match, when a small change in approach can turn the tide.
Tiebreak breakdowns. Tiebreaks–especially long ones–have a life of their own, and analysts should be able to see all of the same stats for each tiebreak as for each set as a whole. For example, it would be interesting to see if a player’s ace or double fault rates (or even his or her first-serve percentage) changed between the first twelve games of a set and the breaker.
A list of the score when each double fault occurred. (Aces would be nice, too.) Especially in men’s tennis, DFs are quite rare, and they often loom large in match narratives.
Longest streaks for each player: consecutive aces, consecutive double faults, consecutive points won on serve, consecutive points won overall, and the score at the beginning and end of each of those streaks.
For doubles matches, a separation of all of the above service stats by server. For the Samuel Groth/Leander Paes partnership, aggregate serve stats f (as they are presented now) aren’t going to tell you anything useful about either player’s performance at the line.

To reiterate, all of this stuff is in the scorecards. Most of the above are no more difficult to compile than the Match Stats that the tours already publish.

If the tours added everything on my list, that would be one big step out of the dark ages for tennis. Certainly, tennis writers would be able to file more intelligent stories and fans would have a much better way to experience the performances of their favorite players.

If the tours published current and archived raw point-by-point data, tennis would go one better: it would become an example for many other individual sports to follow. We would see an boom in fan engagement as every follower of the sport would have the opportunity to learn much more about tennis and relive matches–whether last week or late last century–in detail.

We’re not talking about a multi-million dollar infrastructure investment. To achieve all this, the tours need only do a little bit more with what they already have.

Three Simple Ways to Improve the ATP Ranking System

Italian translation at settesei.it

Rafael Nadal’s two-year ranking system would favor a few veterans at the expense of everyone else. My algorithm is too complex for players and fans to use on a weekly basis. But there is always an undercurrent of dissatisfaction over the current system.

The rankings serve two main purposes, each of which we must keep in mind as we think through a better system:

Entertainment. The fans want to know who’s number one. No system will ever be perfect, but if the ranking system told us that Nadal outranked Djokovic despite losing to him several times in a row, the system would lose credibility.
Tournament entry. Rankings determine who gets direct entry into tournaments. A biased ranking system would keep stronger players out of tournaments while letting in lesser players.

A system that is good for one of these purposes is generally good for the other. In an ideal world, the rankings would show us who is playing the best right now, carefully defining “right now” to avoid an unnecessary focus on current hot streaks. Another way to look at is that the rankings should be as predictive as possible. If underdogs are constantly winning, that doesn’t mean tennis is a sport full of triumphant underdogs, it means we’re ranking players incorrectly!

The current system isn’t that bad. There are three main problems, however:

Last week is equal to last year. The winner in Miami this week will gain 1000 points. Those 1000 points will be counted in his ranking next week, in six months, and in 51 weeks. In 53 weeks, though, he’ll have zero points. If we’re trying to measure how good he is, a tournament 51 weeks ago isn’t nearly as informative as his tournament last week. And if we insist on using his result from 51 weeks ago, why not his result from 53 weeks ago?
Surfaces are interchangeable. Milos Raonic won a slew of matches on indoor courts last spring, which earned him a seed at the French Open. Now, I love Milos, but did he really deserve a seed at the French, despite virtually no professional experience on clay? Performance on one surface translates to other surfaces to some extent, but (obviously!) all surfaces are not created equal.
All opponents are equal. In the Miami third round, Andy Roddick beat Roger Federer … then lost. He’ll get 90 points. Kei Nishikori beat Lukas Rosol … then lost. These sorts of differences sometimes even out over time, but must we trust that they will? Roddick’s achievement this week is much more impressive than Nishikori’s, and should be treated as such.

We can fix all of these problems with simple arithmetic, making tweaks to the system that any player or fan can understand.

In these solutions, the exact details don’t matter. The most important thing is simply to acknowledge that not all matches are equal.

Last week is worth more than last year. In my system, last week is worth a little bit more than the week before, which is worth a little bit more than the week before that, and so on. Here’s a simple way to incorporate that into the ATP system: After four months, tournaments are worth only 80% of their original points. After eight months, tournaments are worth only 60% of their original points. That way, the drop off is more gradual, and Indian Wells is worth more than, say, the 2011 Rome Masters. If Nadal still wants two years, this can easily be extended to cover two years of results–after a year, 45%; after 16 months, 30%, after 20 months, 15%. Now everybody’s happy!
Separate surfaces, separate rankings. There will always–and should always–be a single most important ranking list, encompassing all surfaces. But for tournament entry, why not do better? For example, create a clay list by doubling the point value of all clay tournaments and leaving the others alone. David Ferrer and Carlos Berlocq will rise; John Isner and Kevin Anderson will fall. Any tennis fan knows this happens, so tournaments should determine entry this way, as well. After all, Wimbledon has long used this sort of approach for seeding, if not for direct entry.
Bonus points for beating top players. The WTA used to do this, and it’s the least straightforward of my suggestions. It’s so important, though, that a little complexity is worth a lot. Let’s say 100 points for a win over anyone in the top 3; 75 points for beating anyone ranked 4, 5, or 6; 50 points for a win over anyone else in the top 10, 30 points for beating anyone ranked 11-15, and 10 points for a win over anyone ranked 16-20. Mega-upsets like those scored lately by Isner, Roddick, and Grigor Dimitrov tell us something important, and the rankings should listen.

This is all stuff you can do on a calculator–nothing is more complex than the rules governing protected rankings or zero-pointers. Young players will see their rankings rise more quickly once they begin beating the top guys. All players will get into tournaments (and earn seeds) on surfaces where they have had more success . And the fans will have a more accurate ranking system both to rely upon and to fuel arguments about which players are really better.

The Fatal Flaw of Nadal’s Two-Year Ranking System

Italian translation at settesei.it

Now that Rafael Nadal has resigned from the ATP player council–apparently because no one took his two-year ranking plan seriously–we’re likely to hear a bit more about this alternate approach.

Presumably, Nadal’s method would count the last 104 weeks (two years) of results instead of the last 52, as is currently the case. As far as I know, he isn’t pushing for any other adjustments. As long as that is the case, the rest of the council (and the ATP in general) is right to ignore Nadal’s plan: It would do significant damage to the sport, without much in the way of benefits. It would drastically slow the rise of young players, but change little for guys at the top.

Ultimately, the question is over the purpose of the ranking system. If it is to reward past performance, a two-year ranking system may be appropriate. If it is to rank competitors by their current level of play, treating a tournament 22 months ago the same as last week’s tournament is flat-out wrong.

Consider what the present ranking system tells us. By equally weighting tournaments over the last 52 weeks (with more points for more important events, of course), a player’s ranking is the average of how good he has been over the last 52 weeks–in other words, it’s a approximation of how good he was 26 weeks ago. For most players, this is a decent estimate of how good they are right now. If we go to a two-year system, the rankings would be an estimate of how good players were one full year ago. Yikes.

The most obvious casualties of such a system are young players (or any players, really) on the way up. Even with the current system, the rankings take some time to catch up with a rising star like Bernard Tomic or Milos Raonic. When Raonic had his great run in early 2011, the rankings were still counting a bunch of challenger results from one year earlier. In a two-year system, Raonic’s more recent results would count for even less. It would take twice as long for such a player to establish himself.

The clear beneficiaries, of course, are the opposite type of competitor: established players who are declining or injured. If a player is consistently good, it really doesn’t matter how the ranking system is calculated–just about any way you slice it, Djokovic, Nadal, Federer, and Murray would be the top four. But the players who benefit are the ones who posted good results between 52 and 104 weeks ago, and haven’t done nearly as well since. Right now, that means injured players like Robin Soderling, and declining players like Andy Roddick and Fernando Verdasco.

Should Roddick and Verdasco continue to be rewarded for their play in 2010? To me, anyway, the answer is a clear “no.” Even with Roddick’s sharp decline, he will probably still earn a seed for the French Open. Does he deserve more than that?

But what about Soderling? He hasn’t played since June, and his ranking has fallen to #30. Unless he returns in the next three months, he’ll fall off the list altogether. If there is a case for Nadal’s system, this is it. But the ATP already has two methods in place to protect players like Soderling: protected rankings (PR) and wild cards. Players injured for a certain length of time are able to use a PR (equal to their ranking when they last played) for entry to a set number of tournaments. Until recently, Tommy Haas was still using a PR of 20. Soderling would have a PR that would get him into enough tournaments to rebuild his ranking, assuming he comes back with any semblance of his previous form.

Of course, there’s also the wild card. When Soderling returns, even if he is unranked, every 250- and 500-level tournament would hand him a wild card without a second thought. This makes PRs even more valuable than the ATP intended them to be: Haas, for example, has been able to use his PR of 20 for so long because many tournaments gave him wild cards. He could save the PR for when he needed it.

The only disadvantage to PRs and WCs is that these players aren’t seeded. But really, after sitting out for a year, does a player deserve safe passage to the third round? I find it hard to believe that they do. And if this is really such an important issue, perhaps a player such as Soderling could be granted the lowest seed (e.g. 32, at Indian Wells, Miami, or a slam) two of the times he uses his protected ranking.

To recap: A simple two-year system would retard the rise of young players, forcing them to prove themselves for twice as long as is currently the case. It wouldn’t affect consistently good players. It would help players on the decline who probably don’t deserve help. And top players returning from injury have little problem entering tournaments; Nadal’s approach would just get them seeds.

But Jeff, doesn’t your ranking system use two years of results?

Yes, I was getting to that. It’s crucial to distinguish between using two years of results (acceptable) and weighting all results equally (unacceptable).

The biggest problem with the ATP ranking system as is–and it would be an even bigger problem with a two-year system like Nadal’s–is that it treats long-ago tournaments as equal to yesterday’s tournaments. The winner of the 2012 Indian Wells event has 1000 points on his ranking. The winner of the 2011 Miami even has 1000 points on his ranking. The winner of the 2011 Indian Wells event has … zero points on his ranking.

How a player performed 18 months ago, or 20 months ago, has some predictive value. But not nearly as much as the predictive value of their more recent performances. In slight support of Nadal’s case, this is particularly true of players returning from injury. My system never removed Juan Martin del Potro from the top 10 or so; using a one-year system, the ATP rankings saw him drop far out of the top 100.

If you are to use two years of results, it is absolutely imperative to differentiate between recent results and older results. In fact, even a simple approach of this sort would improve the current 52-week system. My algorithm weights results one year ago about half as heavily as last week’s, and two years ago roughly one-quarter as heavily. The weighting is not simple, and thus would be inappropriate for the ATP system, which must be easily understood by both players and fans, but it points the way toward simpler solutions that might work.

That’s enough for today. Check back tomorrow, when I’ll go into more depth about how the current ranking system can be improved.

Better Players in Smaller Tournaments

Last week, Jurgen Melzer entered the qualifying draw of the ATP Zagreb Indoor event. Melzer is ranked about #40 in the world; players ranked at least #116 earned direct entry into the main draw. Melzer decided long after the entry deadline that he wanted some matches in advance of this week’s Davis Cup, so he took the only route remaining open: qualies.

This precise scenario is not a common one. Because tournament entries must be submitted so early, top players err on the side of entering too many. If they ultimately decide not to play, there’s usually a convenient injury and an apologetic withdrawal. When top players do make last-minute decisions, like Melzer did, tournament organizers often have a wild card to spare, giving the star direct entry.

It’s tempting to say that there’s a problem with the early deadlines for tournament entries. Surely, if players didn’t have to decide so early, they might choose to enter more 250s and 500s. But the early deadlines are there for a reason. Not only do they allow players and their entourages to make travel arrangements, but they also lock players in so that tournaments can advertise their lineups.

The problem may not be with early deadlines, but we do have a sub-optimal arrangements. Players enter tournaments they may not play (and tournaments advertise players who won’t show up), players don’t enter tournaments they may want to play (and events can’t advertise those players), and tournaments have less direct control over their field than they would prefer. 32-draw events only get three wild cards, and they want more.

Here’s my solution: Every withdrawal turns into an additional wild card.

Almost every tournament sees a player or two withdraw after the entry deadline but long before the start of qualifying. Currently, those openings go to the highest-ranked entrant not yet in the main draw. It’s not uncommon to see a half-dozen alternates in a main draw, sometimes including guys far down the list, after other alternates have opted for challengers or other ATP events.

Here are some benefits of my proposal:

Most obviously, tournaments have more control over their draws. Rather than admitting a handful of players ranked between #100 and #120, they can add the top-tenner who lost his first-round match last week. Or a local hero who just won a challenger.
More importantly, fans get (probably) better and (definitely) more crowd-pleasing players. The best players (regardless of box-office value) are still invited to enter, and tournament directors have more leeway to give the fans what they want.
Players have less reason to enter events they may not play. (Of course, this could become something of a vicious cycle–fewer entries lead to fewer withdrawals, which leads to fewer additional wild cards … which could result in more of these entries.)
Players can get into events at the last minute. Melzer would get his Davis Cup warmup without have to go through qualifying.

There are a few potential drawbacks:

Fewer opportunities for journeyman pros. Under my plan, Melzer would’ve booted Grega Zemlja, a guy to whom the tennis establishment hasn’t exactly granted many favors. Then again, Zemlja isn’t likely to do much for the tennis establishment, either.
Tournaments could use the extra wild cards to weaken a draw with low-ranked locals. A tournament director wanted to do some favors could easily turn Delray Beach into a clone of the Dallas Challenger. To avoid that, the rule could be supplemented by stipulating that only one of the additional wild cards could be used on a player outside the top 200. Any number of variations would maintain the quality of the draw.
It’s conceivable that tournaments could pressure players to withdraw, making room for a box-office draw. That’s an ugly situation to imagine, and an appropriately stringent policy would need to be put in place to prevent it.

The only clear losers here are journeyman pros–the guys who hang around on the fringes of the main draws but would not regularly receive wild cards as compensation. As much as I like those guys, their occasional entry as an alternate into an ATP 250 main draw is a sacrifice I would be willing to make.

The potential benefits are simply too great. More good players–and by extension, more good matches–in more tournaments? It is almost too easy.