Category: The Rules

April 6, 1973: The Designated Hitter

Ron Blomberg

Many major sports have no compunctions about changing the rules on a nearly constant basis. Too much scoring? Give the defense more freedom. Too little scoring? Unleash the offense. Games too long, or too boring? Stick a clock on the court and force teams to maintain a quicker pace of play.

The two exceptions are baseball and tennis. Both games have been notoriously, persistently reluctant to change in their 150-or-so years as spectator sports. Occasionally, though, circumstances converge to make change possible.

In the early 1970s, a lot of circumstances converged. New leagues sprouted, competition flourished like never before, and–most of all–television forced each sport’s leadership to consider exactly what its product was, and what it should look like.

Baseball’s American League responded to a spate of low scoring seasons and weak attendance by introducing the designated hitter rule. The National League had more history and more stars, but beginning in 1973, the American League–thanks to its willingness to experiment–added more offense. By the end of the decade, it had closed much of the attendance gap.

New York Yankee Ron Blomberg became baseball’s first designated hitter on April 6, 1973. The bat he used for his first time at the plate was sent to the Hall of Fame, even though it barely left his shoulder. In that first appearance of a designated hitter, Blomberg came up with the bases loaded and walked.

Matty Alou, the Yankees veteran who scored on the play, cracked: “See, it’s added offense to the game already.”

* * *

What strikes me about the designated hitter rule is how closely it parallels the adoption of the tiebreak. I’ve already written a few times about the tiebreak in this series about 1973. The now-familiar method of ending sets was still new, and it was still weird.

“Those tie-breakers are such bullshit,” said Raymond Moore after a win in Vancouver in March. “None of the players know how to play them yet.”

Embed from Getty Images

John Newcombe (left) and Stan Smith were considered in 1973 to be among the best tiebreak players in the game. The secret, clearly, was in the mustache.

Some players didn’t like it, but the sport needed to evolve. Jimmy Van Alen had pushed for tie-breaks as part of his “Simplified Scoring System” since the 1950s. We tend to think of long sets as epic, memorable moments. Not so in those days: The typical 12-10 set consisted of two guys who couldn’t return serve for 75 minutes. It wasn’t much fun to watch, and it would never fit into a two-hour slot on network television.

So, nearly a century after competitive tennis began, the sport finally embraced a new idea. The US Open adopted Van Alen’s nine-point “sudden death” tiebreak in 1970, and Wimbledon began playing breakers at 8-all in 1971. World Team Tennis would experiment even further beginning in 1974. While tennis–like designated-hitter baseball–remained easily recognizable, the new rule was a belated acknowledgement that even the most hidebound sports need to change with the times.

For nearly a half-century, purists in both baseball and tennis were left with something to cling to. Pitchers batted for themselves in National League games until 2021, and a first-round match at that year’s French Open ran to 10-8 in the fifth. But the traditionalists could hold out no longer. The designated hitter is now universal in American baseball. Both the grand slams and the Davis Cup have adopted rules to decide every deadlocked set with a tiebreak. The rule changes that represented such a shift 50 years ago finally won the day.

* * *

This post is part of my series about the 1973 season, Battles, Boycotts, and Breakouts. Keep up with the project by checking the TennisAbstract.com front page, which shows an up-to-date Table of Contents after I post each installment.

You can also subscribe to the blog to receive each new post by email:

 

Flipping Coins in the Rain

The singles final in last week’s ITF M15 Antalya event was washed out by rain. It went in the books as a walkover victory for Giovanni Fonio over Juan Manuel Cerundolo. Doubles specialist Harri Heliovaara explains (from the Finnish, via Google translate, via Peter Wetz):

Namely, the ITF competitions were also played here last week, and the men’s final scheduled for Sunday of that competition could not be played at all due to the rain. Normally in that situation, each player only gets the ATP points and prize money of the losing finalist, but now the players threw themselves creatively and decided to decide the final winner with a coin toss. They agreed that the winner of the coin toss would receive a surrender win and thus the winner’s ATP points, while the loser would receive the winner’s prize money, so each received more than what would have resulted from not playing the final anyway.

This is indeed a clever solution, and one that was sometimes employed in the amateur era. When grass courts made up a bigger part of the tour and court maintenance in general was more primitive, it was more common for the tail end of events to be left unplayed. Usually the finalists (or semifinalists, in extreme cases) divided the prizes, but occasionally they resorted to a coin toss, especially in mixed doubles, which has always had a bit of an “exhibition” vibe.

While Fonio and Cerundolo benefited (in different ways) from the coin flip, parts of this scenario don’t quite smell right to me. First I’ll explain why, then I’ll offer a solution.

  1. The winning player gave his prize money to the loser. Change the context a tiny bit, and that’s match fixing.
  2. The ITF doesn’t have a provision in their rulebook for coin-flipping (as far as I know), so this solution only worked because the losing player agreed to claim an injury. Again, this is an unusual situation, but attesting to a fake injury is frowned upon, to say the least.
  3. Fonio gets some extra ranking points. Typically when tournaments are washed out, those points aren’t awarded, so it isn’t as if there is a precedent that Fonio or Cerundolo “deserved” those points. Instead, Fonio gains an unearned edge (albeit a small one) over several similarly-ranked players, who are presumably competing for entry and seeding in the same events.
  4. Players in other unfinished events–such as the Nur Sultan and Potchefstroom Challengers that were halted due to Covid-19 last March–didn’t get a chance to divide the unawarded points, by coin-flipping or any other method.

We can collapse these four points into two issues: First, there’s no ITF rule, so swapping points for prize money requires treading very close to some ethical and rule-breaking lines. Second, allowing players to improvise (sometimes? depending on the attitude of the on-site supervisor? I don’t know) inevitably gives an unearned advantage to some players over others.

Edit the rulebook

Fortunately, this is an easy fix. By providing a simple guideline for situations like this, the ITF can avoid the iffy behavior of prize-swapping and lying about injuries, ensure fairness for players across the whole tour, and do a better job of delivering the rewards that players expect when they show up for a tournament.

How about this:

Matches that cannot be played due to weather or force majeure will be decided by a coin flip, with ranking points awarded to the winner.

I’m not a lawyer, so my one-liner is probably missing a few paragraphs, but the main idea is pretty straightforward.

Prize money is trickier. Should anyone–“winner” or “loser”–receive prize money for unplayed matches? I don’t know. Tournaments–even the occasional ITF–earn revenue from ticket sales and broadcast rights, so they would surely prefer to hold back prize money from unplayed matches. On the other hand, players spend money and travel to events with the expectation that certain rewards are on offer.

Reap the benefits

The biggest gain in establishing this rule is consistency. As fans, we expect that sporting bodies treat players equally, and at the moment, handling unplayable matches is a real (if rare) source of inconsistency.

The other benefit is in guaranteeing at least some of what competitors have been promised. In several past articles, I’ve used metrics such as “expected points” to quantify how a player can expect to perform at a tournament. If he has a 50% chance of reaching the second round, he has a 50% chance of earning those points; if he has a 15% chance of winning the tournament, he has a 15% chance of earning those additional points. Most players don’t explicitly choose tournaments by predicting exact draws and calculating expected points, but many–including Heliovaara, incidentally–very much think in these terms.

If a tournament is forced to end early, those calculations–explicit or not–are worthless. As a qualifier and the fifth seed, respectively, Fonio and Cerundolo probably would’ve been happy with finalist points in Antalya. But what about the players who ended up making trips to Kazakhstan and South Africa last March for nothing better than quarter-finalist points?

As I’ve said above, we can debate whether tournaments should be expected to pay out prize money (and whether prize money should go to the coin-flip losers, as it did in Antalya), but there’s no reason for a similar dispute about ranking points. Sure, some players would get lucky in that a coin proclaims them the winner, but it’s not much different from finding oneself the beneficiary of a withdrawal, or even in a weak section of the draw.

Fonio and Cerundolo ended up with the right solution, and I’m glad the tournament supervisor didn’t stand in the way. I just wish the coin flip were standard practice, to avoid the ethical tightrope walk. I’m sure that players would appreciate the increased clarity, as well.

What Happens to the Pace of Play Without Fans, Challenges, or Towelkids?

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced some experimentation on the US Open ahead of schedule. After just a couple of years at marginal events such as the NextGen Finals, Hawkeye’s live line-calling system is taking over (on most courts) for human line judges. Another NextGen-tested innovation, requiring players to fetch their own towels, has also arrived for social distancing reasons.

Automated line-calling and towel-fetching pale in comparison to the biggest change for the bubble slam: no fans. The biggest stars now get to experience what has long been de rigueur for qualifiers and challengers: high-stakes competition with no one in the stands watching.

All of these changes come not long after the US Open (and a few other tournaments) finally adopted a serve clock. I’ve written ad nauseam* about the effect of the serve clock, which is nominally designed to speed up play, but in practice has slowed it down. The problem is that chair umpires start the clock when they announce the score, which is not always immediately after the preceding point. The bigger the crowd, the more serious the discrepancy, as noisy fans tend to delay announcements from the chair.

* Incidentally, this is also the Latin term for a long game with many deuces.

Therefore, the pace of play should be faster with no fans, right? Use of the Hawkeye live system also eliminates challenges, which should speed things up a little more. The counteracting force is the time it takes players to fetch their towels. It would be nice to evaluate each of these effects in isolation*, but most of the data we have comes from matches with all of these changes at once.

* No pun intended.

The net effect

The most straightforward measurement of pace of play is seconds per point, where we simply take the official match time and divide by the total number of points. It’s an approximate measure, because official match time includes changeovers, medical timeouts, and all sorts of other delays which have nothing to do with how long it takes for players to get themselves to the line and hit a serve. It also captures a bit of first serve percentage (second serve points take more time) and rally length (longer rallies take more time), although these factors mostly wash out, especially when comparing pace of play at the same tournament from one year to the next.

The following graph shows seconds per point for all Cincinnati (and “Cincinnati”) main draw men’s singles matches each year since 2000:

(I’m looking only at pace of play for men’s matches because I don’t have match time for women before 2016. Lame, I know.)

Over the 21-year span, the average time per point is just under 40 seconds, and before 2020, the yearly average exceeded 42 seconds only once. This year, Cinci clocked in at a whopping 44.6 seconds per point, more than three standard deviations above the 2000-2017 (that is, pre-serve clock) average. The pace has gradually slowed down over the years for reasons unrelated to the serve clock, so it’s probably overstating things a bit to say that the effect of the bubble is 3 SD, but it’s clear that 2020 was slow.

But wait, what about

All four of this year’s men’s semi-finalists are rather deliberate, so you might think that the slow average pace is due in part to the mix of players who won a lot of matches. That’s what I thought too, but it’s not so. (It helps to remember that more than half of a tournament’s matches are in the first two rounds, even with some first-round byes, so we’re guaranteed a decent mix of players for calculations like this, no matter who advances.)

First, I re-did the seconds-per-point calculations above, but excluded all matches with Novak Djokovic or Rafael Nadal, two guys who win a lot of matches and are known to play slowly. It didn’t really matter. I won’t bother to print a second graph, because it looks essentially the same as the one above.

Another approach is to consider the average pace of play for each player in the draw, and compare his seconds per point in Cincinnati to his seconds per point at other events. If every man played at the same speed in Cincinnati that he did on average in 2019, the average seconds per point at the 2020 Cinci event would have been 41.3. That’s just barely above the 2019 Cinci figure of 41.0, and of course it is far below the actual rate of 44.6 seconds per point. The mix of players can’t account for 2020’s glacial pace.

But why?

I hope you’re with me thus far that the pace of play in the 2020 Cincinnati men’s event was very slow. It seems reasonable to assume that the US Open will be the same, because the conditions and rules are identical.

The simplest explanation is that players are spending extra time fetching their own towels.*

* No, you’re a towel.

It’s true–walking to and from the towel takes time. But it’s not the whole story. At the typical non-bubble rate of 40 seconds per point (again, including changeovers and other delays), there are plenty of points where the umpire delays calling the score and the server ends up taking longer than the rulebook-permitted 25 seconds without getting called for a time violation. So if the average is now pushing 45 seconds, there must be a lot of points like that.

Anecdotally, there definitely are such points. In the Cincinnati semi-final, I noticed one instance in which Roberto Bautista Agut used more than 40 seconds before serving. He’s not the only offender: All four men’s semi-finalists (among many others) occasionally used more than 25 seconds. My impression was that, ironically, Djokovic was the speediest of the four.

Chair umpires are using their discretion to act as if there are fans making noise. After long points, they often wait to call the score, and even when they announce the score immediately, they hold off several more seconds before starting the clock. In one glaring instance in the Lexington final, the umpire waited a full 17 seconds after the previous point ended before the clock showed 0:25. The broadcast camera angles at the National Tennis Center made it hard to measure the same thing for Cincinnati matches, but given the length of time between points and the dearth of time violation penalties, there must have been other delays in the range of 15 to 20 seconds.

With no fans delaying play, and no tactical challenges to force a delay, a slow pace is something that the umpire can control. Yes, towel-fetching takes time, but if the 25-second clock starts immediately and it is enforced, players will make it back to the line in time–matches at the NextGen Finals were generally brisk. But apparently, enforcing the rulebook-standard pace is not something that the officials are willing to do. We’re two years into the great tennis serve-clock experiment, and the game just keeps getting slower.

Are Tournament Draws Giving Us Suspiciously Many Venus-Serena Clashes?

This week in Lexington, top seed Serena Williams faces her sister, Venus Williams, in the second round. They are both among the all-time greats, and they have played each other nine times in grand slam finals, so it’s always jarring to see them turn up in the same section of a draw and play on a Thursday.

Lately, their encounters seem to always happen long before the business end of a tournament. Their three matches between the 2017 Australian Open final and this week in Lexington all happened in the round of 32, including a planned 2019 Rome meeting from which Serena withdrew. Venus is usually unseeded, no longer the world-beater she once was, so it is at least possible that the Williams sisters would be bracket neighbors in any given week.

But should it happen quite so often? It is an understatement to say that Serena and Venus were not universally embraced upon arrival in the tennis world. If you’re conspiracy minded, every tournament draw is an opportunity to commit dastardly deeds. Perhaps early in the Williams era, it was the work of racist or otherwise misguided tournament officials who wanted to avoid all-Williams finals. Or nowadays, event honchos recognize that Venus is unlikely to reach the final, so they tinker with the bracket to make a headline-grabbing Williams-versus-Williams clash more likely.

I’m sure that most draws are conducted on the up-and-up, but the process is sufficiently opaque that it’s easy to get suspicious. It’s also easy to make mistaken generalizations from insufficient data. Let’s see what the numbers can tell us.

150 tournaments!

Lexington is the 150th tour event with both Serena and Venus in the field.*

* I think. My WTA data isn’t perfect for the early years of their careers, and there was an uncomfortable amount of manual tabulation involved in this post. Their TennisAbstract player pages are missing the 1999 Grand Slam Cup, but I’ve included it in all the numbers here. For the purposes of doing analytics, it doesn’t matter much if the total is 148 or 151, but if you’re printing a banner or making a cake, you should double-check.

Thursday’s match in Lexington will be their 31st, plus one withdrawal apiece. In 13 of the 150 events, the Williams sisters were either the top two seeds or the 3rd and 4th seeds, meaning that draw shenanigans were out of the question–they could not face each other until the final. 4 of those 13 times, that’s exactly what they did.

What are the odds?*

* Of me being able to use this sub-heading in any given blog post?

I went through the remaining 137 tournaments and identified the round in which they either did meet or could have met. For the purposes of analyzing draws, there isn’t really a difference. For instance, Serena and Venus have landed in the same half 73 out of a possible 137 times, a bit more than the 68 or 69 times that we would expect.

Because of their seeds, they had the chance of ending up in the same quarter 116 times, and that’s how it worked out 28 times, just under the 29 times that an exact one-in-four rate would’ve given them. The smaller the draw section, the fewer tournaments that Serena’s and Venus’s seeds made it possible for them to meet.

I counted the number of tournaments with a possible meeting on or before a certain round, and then the number of events in which the draw delivered that meeting, regardless of whether both Williamses got that far. Here are the results, along with the probability of that many or more actual meetings:

Section  Possible  Actual  Chance  
Half          137      73     25%  
Quarter       116      28     62%  
Eighth         85      17      3%  
16th           64       5     37%  
32nd           42       1     74%

There’s a one-in-four chance that Serena and Venus would’ve landed in the same half as many times as they have throughout their entire careers. That’s a bit of bad luck, but it’s hardly a smoking gun. The same is true for the same quarters, as well as very early meetings that would pit them against each other in the round of 32 or 64.

That leaves one eyebrow-raising number to discuss. On 85 occasions, at least one of the two women was seeded outside the top eight, making possible a meeting in the round of 16 or earlier. Given random draws, we’d expect 10 or 11 brackets in which they could face each other so early. Instead, we got 17.

A 3% chance of so many early encounters isn’t quite as bad as it sounds. I’ve tried to walk you through this process in the way I approached it. While I wondered if Serena and Venus have met more often than random draws would normally deliver, I didn’t have a particular round in mind. As you’ve seen, I generated a bunch of numbers, and one of the five looked suspicious. You might be able to construct a story that explains why the round of 16 is different from the others (such as my theory that tournament directors want mid-week headlines), but because we generated so many numbers, we were that much more likely to end up with an extreme percentage simply by chance.

The smoking (nerf) gun

Thus, we’re able to raise the possibilities that some draws weren’t random, but we can hardly prove it. One problem–one that we could’ve foreseen from the get-go–is that some draws are definitely not tampered with. Probably most draws. And even if they were, most tournaments wouldn’t have any reason to mess with Serena’s or Venus’s placement in the bracket. Or if they did, they might prefer an all-Williams final, and thus alter the bracket in the opposite direction of what we’re hunting for.

If you like conspiracy hunting, I’ve got a tiny sample for you. Since the beginning of 2018, Venus and Serena have played in the same tournament 15 times, and their seedings (or lack thereof) made it possible for them to be drawn in the same eighth 14 of those times. Of the 14, they were placed in position for a round-of-16 or earlier meeting 5 times. There’s only a 2% chance of that … if you set aside the fact that I’m checking all sorts of subsets of matches looking for (probably spurious) patterns. If nothing else, the 5-of-14 figure explains why it seems like Serena and Venus keep landing in the same draw sections lately. They do!

Broadly speaking, then, this is all much ado about nothing. (I don’t even know if these conspiracy theorists exist, so maybe I just invented a conspiracy and spent my evening debunking it. Hooray?) It’s possible that a few tournament directors are producing non-random draws … but it would take a very different kind of investigative work to prove it. Worst case scenario, we get a few more Serena-Venus matches. It may not be fair to the older sister, but it’s a pretty good deal for tennis fans.

Grand Slam Prize Money Whack-a-Mole

Eagle-eyed Twitterer @juki_tennis noticed the following tweaks to the rules for the 2020 grand slams:

Let’s start with the first underlined section. I’ll get to the doubles tweak in a bit.

The ITF is learning that incentives are tricky. In the olden days, back when Adrian Mannarino still had hair, prize money was simple. If you played, you got some. If you didn’t, you got none. Players who get hurt right before one of the four biggest events of the season suffered in silence.

Except it’s never been quite that simple. The slams have spent the last decade taking turns breaking prize-money records, raising in particular the take for first-round losers. A spot in the main draw of the Australian Open is now worth $63,000 USD ($90,000 AUD). Some players in the qualifying draw barely make that much in an entire season. Whatever one’s hangups about honesty or fair play, if you have a chance to grab that check, you take it.

The same logic applies whether you’re healthy or injured. The last decade or so of grand slam tennis has been littered with first-round losers who weren’t really fit to compete. That’s bad for the tournaments, bad for the fans, and probably not that great for the players themselves, even if $63k does buy a lot of physiotherapy.

Paid withdrawals

Two years ago, the ITF took aim at the problem. Players with a place in the main draw could choose to withdraw and still collect 50% of first-round loser prize money. The ATP does something similar, giving on-site withdrawals full first-round loser prize money for up to two consecutive tournaments. The ATP’s initiative has been particularly successful, cutting first-round retirements at tour-level events from a 2015 high of 48 to only 20 in 2019. In percentage terms, that’s a decline from 4.4% of first-round matches to only 1.6%.

The results at slams are cloudier. On the men’s side, there were nine first-round retirements in 2010, and nine in 2019. The ITF’s incentives might not be sufficient: 50% of first-round prize money is still a substantial sum to forego. In fairness to the slams, retirements may not tell the whole story. A hobbled player can still complete a match, and perhaps the prize money adjustment has convinced a few more competitors to give up their places in the main draw.

None of this, however, keeps out players who consciously game the system. Both the ATP and WTA allow injured players to use their pre-injury rankings to enter a limited number of events upon their return. Savvy pros maximize those entries (“protected” in ATP parlance, and “special” in WTA lingo) by using them where the prize pots are richest and, if possible, bridging the gap with wild cards into smaller events.

Emblematic of such tactics is Dmitry Tursunov, who played (and lost) his last six matches at majors, all using protected rankings. Two of those, including his final grand slam match at the 2017 US Open against Cameron Norrie, ended in retirement. Three of the others were straight-set losses. In one sense, Tursunov “earned” those paydays. He was ranked 31st going into Wimbledon in 2014, then missed most of the following 18 months. Upon return, he followed ATP tour rules. But with the increasingly disproportionate rewards available at slams, protected rankings seem sporting only when used as part of a concerted comeback effort.

While the ITF’s late-withdrawal policy wasn’t in place for Tursunov, it’s easy to imagine a player in a similar situation taking advantage. And that’s the gap that the latest tweak aims to plug. The new rule is not limited to players on protected or special rankings, which typically require absences of six months, not just one. Yet the idea is similar. You can no longer enter, turn up on site, plead injury, and take home tens of thousands of dollars … unless you’ve competed recently. It’s a low bar, but it raises the standard a bit for players who want to take home a $30,000 check.

One of two prongs

The rule adjustment wouldn’t have affected Tursunov’s lucrative protected-ranking tour of 2016-17. However, had the Russian come back from injury a couple of years later, his income might not have gone uncontested.

In 2019, both Roland Garros and Wimbledon invoked another rarely-used clause in the rulebook. It requires that players “perform to a professional standard,” and a failure to do so can result in fines up to the amount of first-round prize money. Anna Tatishvili–using a special ranking–was docked her full paycheck at the French Open, and Bernard Tomic–a convenient whipping boy whenever this sort of thing comes up–lost his take-home from the All England Club. Both fines were appealed, and Tatishvili’s was overturned. (Tomic’s should have been, too.)

What matters for the purposes of today’s discussion isn’t the size of Tatishvili’s bank account, but the fact that the majors have dug the “professional standard” clause out of cold storage. It’s worth quoting the various factors that the rulebook spells out as possibly contributing to a violation of the standard:

  • the player did not complete the match
  • the player did not compete in the 2-3 week period preceding the Grand Slam
  • the player retired from the last tournament he/she played before the Grand Slam
  • the player was using a Protected or Special Ranking for entry
  • the player received a Code Violation for failure to use Best Efforts

Every major has a few players who are skirting the line, perhaps returning to action a bit sooner than they would have if the grand slam schedule were different. With the fines in 2019, the ITF has made clear that they expect to see credible performances from all 256 main draw players. And with the prize money adjustment for 2020, the governing body has closed the door on five-figure paydays for players who shouldn’t have been on the entry list, even if they never take the court.

I promised to talk about doubles

The second section of the rulebook quoted above is a bit problematic, because I believe it is missing a key “not” in the opening sentence. Unless the ITF has some bizarre and unprecedented goals, the intention of the doubles regulations is to discourage singles players from retiring in doubles unless they are truly injured, and to prevent singles players from even entering doubles unless they plan to take it seriously.

Doubles prize money pales next to the singles pot, but even first-round losers in men’s and women’s doubles will take home $17,500 USD per team, or $8,750 per player. That’s enough to convince most singles players to enter if their ranking makes the cut, no matter how little they care about doubles during the 44 non-slam weeks of the year.

The majors determine which teams make the doubles cut the same way that ATP and WTA tour events do. Teams are ordered by their combined singles or doubles ranking. Each player can use whichever is better. The tours allow pros to use their singles rankings to encourage superstars to play doubles, and at events like Indian Wells, many big names do take part. At the slams, the bigger effect is on the next rung of singles players, giving us oddball doubles teams such as Mackenzie McDonald/Yoshihito Nishioka and Lukas Lacko/John Millman at the 2018 US Open.

As with other details of the entry process, most fans couldn’t care less. But they should. Whenever the rules let one team in, they leave another team out. By including more singles players in the doubles draw, the standard for full-time doubles players is made almost impossibly strict. An up-and-coming men’s singles player can crack the top 100–and gain admission to grand slam main draws–with a solid season on the challenger tour, but even the best challenger-level doubles teams are often left scrambling for partners whose singles rankings are sufficient to gain entry.

This year’s rulebook edit should help matters, at least a bit. (As long as someone inserts the missing “not,” anyway.) Grand slam doubles is not an exhibition, and it shouldn’t be contested by players who treat it that way. The ATP and WTA should follow suit, penalizing players who withdraw from doubles only to prove their health by continuing to play singles.

Incentives and intentions

These rule changes, while technical, are aimed at something rather simple: to ensure that the players who enter slam main draws–both singles are doubles–are healthy and motivated to play. The latest tweaks won’t close every loophole, and we can expect more disputes over issues like the Tatishvili and Tomic fines.

The bigger issue, complicated by the on-site withdrawal adjustment, is the underlying purpose of the rise in first-round loser prize money. The slams represent a huge proportion of the season-long prize pool, especially for players between approximately 50th and 110th in the ATP and WTA rankings. These competitors miss the cut for many of the most prestigious Masters and Premier tournaments. Even in later rounds, they are usually playing for four-figure stakes–if that. Four times a year, pros with double-digit rankings get a guaranteed cash infusion, and the potential for much more.

The presence of the four majors effectively funds the rest of the season for many players. The slams have upped first-round prize money–both nominally and relative to increases in later-round awards–partly in recognition of that fact. It is expensive to be a touring pro, and without paydays from the majors, it can easily be a money-losing endeavor.

Salary, not prize money

The majors rely on the less-lucrative tours for year-round publicity and a pool of highly-skilled players to drive fans and media attention to their mega-events. Much of the first-round loser prize money is in recognition of that fact. No one really thinks that the 87th-best player in the world deserves $63k just for showing up and giving Serena Williams a mild 59-minute workout. But does the 87th-best player in the world deserve to collect annual revenue of $250k–a figure that will largely go to cover travel, training, coaching, and equipment expenses? I think so, it appears that the slams think so, and I suspect you do, too.

So, when the ITF closes loopholes like these, keep in mind that they are operating within the silly $63k-per-hour framework, not the more reasonable $250k-per-season model. It is an important goal to ensure the integrity and quality of play at slams, but it ought to be paired with an effort to support tennis’s rank-and-file, even when those journeymen are injured.

A more sensible policy would be to separate much of the first-round loser prize pool from the literal act of playing a first round match. Perhaps the slams could each contribute $7.5 million each year–that’s $30k per singles player–to a general fund that would disburse annual grants to players ranked outside the top fifty, and lower every singles award by the same amount. (The details would be devilish, starting with these few parameters.) Such an approach would come out in the wash for most players, who would simply receive the extra $30k per slam in a different guise. But it would help injured players return to top form, and it would leave plenty of money for high-stakes combat at the sport’s biggest stages. Such a solution, of course, would require a lot more than a few minor edits to the rulebook.

How to (Partly) Fix the Davis Cup Finals

This is a guest post by Sébastien Rannaud.

There was plenty to criticize about the new-look Davis Cup Finals. Fans and pundits alike took aim at the atmosphere, the one-sided home support for Spain, the horrendous app and website, the lack of TV coverage, and the sleep-defying scheduling.

But perhaps the biggest controversy concerned something more arcane: Canada’s walkover in a dead doubles rubber against the United States. Why? The organizers gave the United States a double bagel win (6-0, 6-0) which padded their percentages in the Group F standings, thus increasing its chances of qualifying for the knockout stage as one of the two “best runners-up Nations” in round robin play.

To determine how the runners-up from each group are ranked against each other, the following order applies:

  1. Highest percentage of matches won
  2. Highest percentage of sets won
  3. Highest percentage of games won
  4. The Nations’ positions on the Davis Cup Rankings of the Monday of the week of the Finals

As you can see, that double bagel win for the US padded their stats in criteria #1 through #3.

Other tournaments, such as the ATP and WTA Finals use this criteria, but they don’t have walkovers, because they rely on substitute players in case of injury. The Davis Cup Finals is a different beast altogether, because of the “dead rubber” in round robin play. There are no incentives, sporting or financial, to play and win that match if you’ve already clinched your place in the quarter-finals, as Canada did before its doubles match against the US.

Odd constraints

This convoluted format is mainly due to two major factors. First, the Davis Cup Finals is comprised of 18 nations. Why use such a random number, when the knockout stage only involves eight nations? The only possible solution is to give wildcards to runner-up teams to complete the eight-team draw, hence the complicated tie-breaking procedure.

The second factor is that the tournament is played over a seven-day span. The organizers (Kosmos Group and ITF) would rather have a two-week timeslot for the event, but for now, seven days is the most they could get considering the not-so-ideal timeslot. If it is necessary to have three rounds in the knockout stage (quarter-finals, semi-finals, final), then you’re left with very limited round robin play, which explains the tiny three-team groups, playing only two ties each.

Such a small number of matches ensures that the tie breaking rules will come into play, making every match–including every doubles rubber–extremely important.  Therefore, when a team decides to forfeit its doubles match, rules need to be in place to ensure that the team benefitting from the walkover doesn’t have an unfair advantage over second-place teams from other groups.

Journalists, pundits and Twitter users have critiqued this major flaw in the format, but few have considered possible solutions. Let’s consider some of the adjustments that could be made and if they could work within the tournament’s constraints. 

The first solutions: Dead rubber tweaks

Let’s assume that the organizers would allow all dead rubbers to be skipped. In some cases, fans would buy tickets for only two matches, not three. The organizers would have to adjust the ticket prices somehow to reflect that likelihood, if they want to show fairness and respect to the ticket buyers.

Scenario A:

  • Same as current format (18 teams, 3-round knockout stage)
  • Dead rubber policy: walkover from clinching team. Winning team gets 1 point, but match does NOT count towards % of matches won, % of sets won, and % of games won

The team getting stomped on in the first two singles matches would not get the opportunity in the doubles match to make up for its bad percentages in the prior singles matches, while the winning team would be rewarded with keeping its near-perfect percentages. It is a system based on results, so it’d be difficult for a losing team to argue that it’s unfair to them, especially considering the fact that it gets to rest and go to bed earlier, on the eve of its do-or-die tie the next day against the other nation in the group.

Scenario B:

  • Same as current format (18 teams, 3-round knockout stage)
  • Dead rubber policy: walkover from clinching team. Winning team gets 1 point, but with a score of 6-4, 4-6, 6-4 counting towards % of matches won, % of sets won, and % of games won

Let’s say the two singles matches were lost in straight sets. The team benefitting from the walkover go from 0% of sets won to 29% of sets won. That seems reasonable and much less extreme that a 6-0, 6-0 score.

Scenario C:

  • Same as current format (18 teams, 3-round knockout stage)
  • Dead rubber policy: doubles match must be played. Bonus prize money ($100,000) will be given to the two players winning the match

We can assume that a clinching team would play its “second tier” players for the doubles rubber. These players would have a six-figure incentive to win the rubber–even at 4:00 AM–a serious motivation for doubles players who compete for smaller prize pools than singles players throughout the year. Because there would only be just a few dead rubbers each year, it wouldn’t be that much more costly for tournament organizers.

More solutions: 16 teams

Scenario D:

  • Round robin: 16 teams split into 4 groups; 3 ties played each
  • 8 teams qualify for knockout stage of 3 rounds (quarters, semis, final)
  • Dead rubber policy: winning team gets 1 point, but match does NOT count towards % of matches won, % of sets won, and % of games won

By playing three ties in the round robin stage, the dead rubber would likely only happen in the third tie, meaning teams would have already played between six and eight tennis matches (singles and doubles) before the dead rubber occurs. The weight of this forfeited match would be no more than one-seventh (14.2%) of the total matches played in the round robin stage. That’s less important than in the current round robin format of two ties, in which the forfeited match counts for one-sixth (16.7%). Moreover, by having groups of four nations, all four teams could play their ties at the same time, meaning that some teams would start the doubles rubber without knowing whether they had yet clinched their quarter-final spot.

Unfortunately, this scenario simply cannot work within the existing seven-day limit, because it would result in both finalists playing a total of six ties over seven days (or between 12 and 18 tennis matches). That is excessively grueling, especially for countries such as Canada and Russia, who essentially competed this year with two-man teams. That is simply not going to fly, especially for elites such as Nadal and Djokovic, who could have played up to five matches the previous week in the ATP Finals.

Scenario E:

  • Round robin: 16 teams split into 4 groups; 3 ties played each
  • 4 teams qualify for knockout stage of 2 rounds (semis, final)
  • Dead rubber policy: winning team gets 1 point, but match does NOT count towards % of matches won, % of sets won, and % of games won

By shortening the knockout stage, we get back to the much more palatable number of five ties in seven days. The upside is that the dead doubles rubber would be of even less importance that the prior scenario, since only the group winning teams would qualify for the knockout stage. The current tiebreaking procedure wouldn’t even matter since the group winning team would likely qualify on ties won and matches won alone.

Tradeoffs

However, solving one issue just raises others.

First, knockout ties are much more compelling for fans than round robin ties. In some cases, the last round robin tie has almost the same “do or die” quality as a quarter-finals tie, but on average, there is less drama. Which leads us to the second issue: teams ranked third or fourth in the group prior to the final round robin tie might already be mathematically eliminated from qualifying for the knockout stage. You could even end up with the third-place team and the fourth-place team playing each other in the last, meaningless “dead tie”–a new term for the tennis glossary that we can only hope never needs to be used. 

While a dead tie would be unlikely, the downside risk is enormous. It’s difficult to imagine how depressing this six-hour tie would feel in the stadium, especially in a neutral venue for both teams with few fans on-site. The ITF/Kosmos Group would be forced to assume that these teams would be professional enough to play the tie, at least in respect of the few hundred fans who show up. But even an 84-shot rally couldn’t salvage such a spectacle.

The only way to solve this would be to add incentives for teams stuck in these dead ties. In a 16-team tournament, you could give each runner-up team a direct entry for the following year’s Davis Cup Finals (in addition to the four group winning teams). Teams battling for third place in the group would be rewarded with the home court advantage in the March qualifying tie. Teams finishing last in the group would get the “away” tie in March or fall to a lower tier in the Davis Cup zone groups. With those incentives, the doubles rubber would usually retain some interest.

For the ITF and the Kosmos Group, cutting back from 18 to 16 teams would be much more complicated than tweaking the tiebreaker rules. With all the problems of this year’s Finals, the dead rubber policy probably isn’t on top of anyone’s to-do list. However, if they stay idle, more teams like Canada and Australia will exploit the loophole, and some day, a team will advance to the quarter-finals because of that double bagel win, leading to a public relations nightmare for the event organizers–not to mention a gut punch for the team that goes home early. 

Sport is only compelling so long as fans perceive an underlying level of fairness. The Davis Cup Finals narrowly skirted disaster this year, calling the format into question for attentive followers. Let’s hope that in the next 12 months, they figure out how to fix it.

—

Sébastien Rannaud is a pension actuary living in Montreal, Canada. You can find him on Twitter at @morggo.

Let Bernie Keep His Money

Italian translation at settesei.it

On Tuesday, Bernard Tomic lost his first-round match at Wimbledon to Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. No surprise there: My forecast gave Tsonga a 64% chance of advancing, and that didn’t even take into account Tomic’s shaky health, which has caused him to retire from matches twice in the last six weeks.

Tomic-Tsonga immediately made the news, and for the wrong reasons. The Australian lost, winning only seven games. Ignominiously, the match lasted only 58 minutes, the shortest at Wimbledon since Roger Federer needed only 54 minutes to thump Alejandro Falla back in 2004.

The All England Club responded this morning, announcing that Tomic would lose his prize money. Officially, he “did not perform to the required professional standard.”

Fast and insufficiently furious

I don’t know whether Tomic performed to the required professional standard, because there’s no exact definition of “professional standard.” I suspect it’s some combination of the following:

  • The player lost badly
  • The player has a reputation for tanking
  • The match got a lot of attention so we have to be seen doing something about it

What I do know is that Wimbledon officials are looking at the wrong number. Yes, 58 minutes is an extremely fast three-set match. But Tomic–even when he’s fully engaged and playing his best–is probably the quickest player on tour, often serving as soon as a ballkid gets him the ball. Tsonga also plays fast. Neither player is a good returner, and the Frenchman is a devastating server on a fast surface, so the points were always going to be short.

The more appropriate metric, then, is points played. Tomic and Tsonga contested 125, which is considerably less headline-grabbing than the time on the clock.

Fines all around!

Suddenly, Tomic-Tsonga doesn’t stand out as much. Since 2000, there have been 77 other men’s grand slam matches that required 125 points or less. That’s almost exactly one per slam. The list includes two quarter-finals, three semi-finals, and the 2003 Australian Open title match, in which Andre Agassi dispatched Rainer Schuettler in 76 minutes, needing only 123 points. If we expand our view to matches with fewer than 130 points, we’re looking at another 45 matches, including both of this year’s Australian Open semi-finals.

Simply put: It is not unusual for a men’s slam match to be decided with 125 points. Really good players sometimes lose that fast. It just doesn’t usually attract so much attention, because on average, 125 points takes an hour and 21 minutes to play.

Of course, there are plenty of one-sided contests in the women’s draw, as well. 125 points is about 42 per set, so the “Tomic line” is at 83 or 84 points for a best-of-three match. Since 2003, there have been 235 women’s singles matches of 83 points or less, including five at this year’s French Open alone. (Ironically, Anna Tatishvili’s loss to Maria Sakkari, which triggered its own unprecedented fine, lasted 93 points and 28 minutes per set.)

Reactionary

All of this isn’t to say that Tomic tried his hardest on Tuesday, or that he “deserves” £45,000 in an ethical sense. If tournament referees made it a practice to review video of every first-round match and dock the prize money of the one player who competed most lackadaisically, then sure, the Australian is probably that guy at Wimbledon this year.

But that’s not how it works. The “professional standard” clause is almost never invoked. Had Tomic frittered away more time between points in order to push this match over the one-hour mark, or the offender had been a player with a less checkered past, we wouldn’t be talking about it now.

If the All England Club were focused on the right metric–the amount of tennis played, not how long it took–Bernie’s speedy, casual style of play wouldn’t be in the headlines. After all, there’s another casual, mercurial Australian with a poor return game who deserves more of our attention today.

Another Slam, Another Pointless Serve Clock

Italian translation at settesei.it

The 25-second serve clock has quickly become a regular feature on the ATP and WTA tours. After a few trials, it made a debut in the run-up to last year’s US Open, and has become broadly accepted since. The US Open and Australian Open both used the countdown timer, and the WTA will employ the devices at 2019 Premier events, with an eye toward the full slate of tournaments in 2020.

As I understand it, the goal of the serve clock is twofold: First, to keep matches shorter by holding players to a standard time limit between points; and second, to enforce that time limit fairly. Tennis and broadcasting execs are always looking for ways to make matches shorter (or, at least, more predictable in length), so the first goal fits in with broader aims. The second is more specific. Many of the players best known for using a long time between points are big stars, and umpires were thought to be reluctant to penalize them. In theory, a standardized serve clock should make enforcement more transparent and ensure fairness.

The success of the second goal is difficult to assess. In one regard, it seems to be working, because we haven’t heard many players complaining about the system. Progress toward the first goal is much easier to judge, and I’ve done so three times: Once after the 2018 Rogers Cup, once after the joint event in Cincinnati, and a third time following the US Open. Each time, the conclusion was clear: The serve clock did not speed up play, and in many cases, it coincided with slower matches.

Count down under

The simplest way to measure the speed of a tennis match is to use the official match time and number of points played, then calculate the number of seconds per point. It’s a crude technique, since the official match time includes time spent playing, pauses between points, changeovers, heat breaks, medical time outs, challenges, and short rain delays. It’s imperfect. But the time spent on changeovers and the like is usually fairly consistent, making comparisons possible.

Here is the average seconds per point for men and women at the 2018 and 2019 Australian Open, reflecting the pace of play both before and after the introduction of the serve clock:

Year  Men Sec/Pt  Women Sec/Pt  
2018        40.2          40.4  
2019        41.0          40.3

This doesn’t exactly constitute a ringing endorsement of the serve clock. On average, matches were a bit slower in 2019 than in 2018. On the other hand, it’s a better result than the 2018 US Open, which was about 2.5 seconds slower than the 2017 pre-serve clock edition.

More precision, still rather slow

As I said, this is a crude way of measuring match speed. For most tournaments, it’s the best we can do without access to proprietary data that the ATP and WTA (presumably) possess. But at the majors, more detailed information is available. At the US Open, and at the Australian Open until 2017, that was the IBM “Slamtracker” data. The Australian Open no longer works with IBM, but it displays similar point-by-point data on its website.

Armed with better data, we can offer more precise estimates of how often players have exceeded the 25-second limit, both before and after the introduction of the serve clock. (Before the timer, the official limit at slams was 20 seconds, but I don’t think that a single time violation was assessed before at least 25 seconds–or more–had elapsed.) After the US Open last year, I found the number of times that players exceeded 25 seconds increased dramatically, as did the frequency that they went over 30 seconds. If you’re interested, went into more methodological detail in that article.

Again, the Australian Open fares better than its American counterpart, but that doesn’t exactly mean the clock is working, just that it isn’t dramatically slowing things down. Here are some figures from the 2017 and 2019 Australian Opens (I didn’t collect the relevant data last year), showing how often players violated the time limit both before and after the introduction of the timer:

Time Between   2017   2019  Change (%)  
under 20s     77.6%  75.9%       -2.2%  
under 25s     91.6%  91.8%        0.2%  
over 25s       8.4%   8.2%       -1.7%  
over 30s       2.8%   2.1%      -25.2%

The last row of this table is the first point I’ve seen that indicates the serve clock is working. Players are exceeding 30 seconds between points far less often than they did two years ago. On the other hand, there’s almost no difference in how often they cross the 25-second mark. And another negative: The “improved” figure of 2.1% of points over 30 seconds is considerably worse than the same rate in New York last year, which was a mere 0.8%. The clock has eliminated some of the most egregious offenses in Melbourne, but a lot more remain.

Carpenters, not tools

The main problem continues to be the way the serve clock is used. The countdown begins when the score is called, and umpires generally wait until crowd noise has subsided before making their announcement. Thus, after exciting shots or long rallies–the very points after which players have historically taken a long time to serve–the time limit is effectively extended. There’s simply no reason for this. Start the timer when the point is over, and if the crowd is still going wild 20 or 25 seconds later, make the appropriate adjustments. But many servers are already playing “to” the serve clock, using all the time they are allotted. The longer the umpire waits to start the clock, the longer all of us must wait until play resumes.

My primary complaint with delayed clock-starting, though, is a different one. Yes, I’d like matches to move along faster. But as with just about every line in the rulebook, the time limit ends up being extended for stars more than it is for journeymen. On a stadium court like Rod Laver Arena, a modest ovation follows nearly every point played, especially those won by a big name like Federer, Nadal, or Serena. Out on Court 20, Johanna Larsson can play a bruising rally and earn nothing more than a polite golf clap. The more anonymous the player, the less recovery time. After a couple of matches, that adds up. A rule designed to increase fairness and transparency shouldn’t work against unknowns, but in this case, at majors, it appears to do just that.

Eventually, I may stop writing about the serve clock. But as long as the tours are pushing an innovation that fails to meet its stated goals, I’ll keep auditing the results. Given a few more years, maybe they’ll get it right.

The Effect of the US Open Serve Clock

Embed from Getty Images

Italian translation at settesei.it

This year’s US Open was the first grand slam to use a countdown clock before each serve. The time between points was set at 25 seconds, up from the official grand slam time limit of 20 seconds, partly to acknowledge the reality that 20 seconds was never going to happen, and to compromise with the ATP and WTA, whose limits have long been 25 seconds. The clock was tested at several North American events this summer, and I’ve already measured the effect of the clock on match times: once at The Economist’s Game Theory blog, and a second time here at Heavy Topspin.

In those two articles, I found that the serve clock seemed to make the sport slower. Using the limited data at hand–the number of points in each match and its overall time–it turned out that at every event using the clock in 2018, matches were slower by between 0.3 and 2.0 seconds per point. That doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up to a few minutes per match, and this is an innovation that was designed to hurry up play, not hold it back.

The US Open gives us a larger set of matches to study as well as more detailed data to work with. Before we attempt a less ham-handed approach to the problem, let’s see how the matches in New York measured up by the simple standard of seconds per point. Here is that calculation for all main draw singles matches in 2017 (without the clock, and a nominal 20-second time limit) and 2018 (with a 25-second clock):

Draw   2017  2018  
Men    40.0  43.4  
Women  40.7  42.3

Those are some awfully slow matches. Of the other summer events I analyzed, only the 2018 men’s draw in Washington exceeded 42 seconds per point.

However, the excessive heat probably played a part in some of the glacial play. The US Open heat policy certainly slowed down matches, as it allowed for a 10-minute break after the first two sets of women’s matches and the first three sets of men’s matches when the conditions were particularly bad. Those breaks are included in the official match times, so we need to account for them somehow.

Let’s skip some extra work and avoid the heat policy entirely by comparing only straight-set matches from 2017 and 2018, none of which were eligible for a heat break. That still leaves us with half of the original data points:

Draw   2017 Straight-Sets  2018 Straight-Sets  
Men                  39.2                43.4  
Women                39.8                41.3

That was not what I expected. The straight-set matches this year were almost the same speed as the longer ones, even without the possibility of a 10-minute heat break. Maybe players don’t dally as much during straight-set matches because so many of them are lopsided. Or perhaps the mix of players is a bit different. Whatever the reason, this apples-to-apples comparison shows that this year’s apples were quite a bit slower than last year’s.

Again, with better data

The heat policy issue illustrated the problem with using overall match time: It includes set breaks, changeovers, challenges, lets, and every other random type of delay you can imagine. In the long run, all the delays will even out, but in the long run, we’ll all be dead. So far, we’ve seen only a few hundred matches on each tour using the serve clock.

The US Open Slamtracker includes timestamps for the beginning of every point of most singles matches. That’s still not perfect–it doesn’t tell us when points end, for one thing–but with a bit of care and handling, it’s something we can work with. First, I took the Slamtracker data and identified every first-serve point that didn’t end the service game. I filtered out second serves because players use such wildly differing times between first and second serves, and that’s not something addressed by the serve clock. And I filtered out game-ending points because the pause after those points would be longer, involving switching servers and often changing sides.

That left about 16,000 points, a healthy amount of data to work with. From there, I tried to figure out how time was spent actually playing tennis. You know, serving, returning, hitting a bunch of slices, that sort of thing. It turns out that each additional shot adds roughly two seconds to the time between the start of that point and the start of the next. A portion of that might be additional fatigue, resulting in a longer between-points break, but I’ll give the players the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s all time spent playing tennis. I’ll also be generous and say that the first shot–the length of an ace or unreturned serve–is five seconds, to allow for some of the more elaborate service motions.

Put it all together, and we have 16,000 points for which we can estimate the length of the break after the point. If the timestamps for point 1 and point 2 are 35 seconds apart and point 1 was a five-stroke rally–5 seconds for the first shot, 8 seconds for the ensuing shots, for a total of 13 seconds–we can conclude that it took 22 seconds for the server to towel off, choose between various amounts of tennis-ball fuzz, and get ready to serve again.

One last step, again in the spirit of generosity: I eliminated the longest 5% of between-point breaks in each match. Some of those are probably challenges, or let serves, or other disruptions not reflected in the data. I’ve probably filtered out some legimate cases in which the server was really, really slow, but I want to do what I can to give us results that are uncontaminated by too many external issues.

Enough methodology, here are the results. The table shows the number of between-point pauses that were under 20 seconds, under 25 seconds, over 25 seconds, and over 30 seconds. Remember that these times, and the resulting rates, are built on a series of player- and official-friendly assumptions. I’m fairly confident that if we took a stopwatch to 16,000 points and audited the process in person, we would be much more likely to come up with equal or longer times between points than shorter ones.

Time Between Points   2017   2018  Change (%)  
Under 20s            86.5%  78.6%       -9.2%  
Under 25s            97.0%  95.1%       -2.0%  
Over 25s              3.0%   4.9%       63.1%  
Over 30s              0.4%   0.8%       91.0%

The number of excessively long breaks was not very high–less than one point in 20 this year–but the figures skyrocketed in comparison with last year. We could attribute this to the rule change from 20 seconds between points in 2017 to 25 this year, but as we’ve seen, matches with the 20 second limit last year were about as fast (on a match-time per point basis) as those with the 25 second time limit. So I think that’s a non-starter.

The heat, of course, remains a factor, even when heat policy breaks are taken out of the equation. Hotter, more humid conditions will tire players out more quickly, and that will show up in the amount of time they spend recovering between points. Maybe that accounts for the near-doubling of 30-second-or-longer pauses since last year.

Still, there are plenty of questions left to be answered about the serve clock and the way umpires are using it. The rate of 30-second or longer breaks, 0.8%, sounds tiny, but across 16,000 points, it’s over 100 cases. My study was able to include only about half of the points in Slamtracker-covered matches, which itself represents perhaps three-quarters of singles rubbers. Thus, we could be talking about over 300 instances of a player taking more than 30 seconds before serving over the course of the tournament. (And remember, we excluded the longest 5% of between-point pauses.) The number of 25-second-or-longer breaks is even more damning: By the same reasoning, there may have been nearly 2,000 times when a player exceeded the 25-second limit. A few time violations were called, sure, but only a tiny fraction of these probable offenses.

As I noted in my previous article here, a big part of the problem stems from officials waiting until after the crowd has settled down to start the clock. Thus, in an exciting, well-attended match, the time limit effectively becomes 35 seconds or more. This may be what umpires are instructed to do, but it is a sure-fire way to slow matches down. There’s no reason not to start the clock immediately and pause it later for the rare instances when the crowd is making too much noise 25 seconds later.

The simple approach to evaluating the effect of the serve clock, outlined at the beginning of this article, continues to suggest that the serve clock has made matches slower. The more sophisticated tack, made possible by the more detailed data available for most grand slams, supports the same argument, and shows us just how often players are still able to take extra time between points. Let’s hope the serve clock is a work in progress, because changes are necessary if it’s going to contribute to a speedier sport.

Gender Differences in Point Penalties

Embed from Getty Images

Italian translation at settesei.it

The officiating in Saturday night’s US Open women’s final has become a hot-button issue, to put it mildly. Many of the complaints about Serena Williams’s treatment at the hands of chair umpire Carlos Ramos come down to a belief that Ramos’s actions were sexist. Most of us have seen players–both men and women–act in ways that seem more objectionable than anything Serena did, and anybody paying attention has seen innumerable coaching violations go unpenalized.

There are a few things we can all agree on. First: Not all umpires are the same. Ramos is more strict than, say, Mohamed Lahyani. Second: Officials have a lot of latitude, so something that triggers a penalty in one match may not have the same result in another match. And third: Umpires usually do everything they can not to call game penalties. A lot of matches have at least one warning, whether for coaching, ball abuse, or a variety of other things, but only a small percentage of them escalate to the loss of a point or game. Of course, players typically proceed with caution as well. Once a warning has been called, you don’t see nearly as many rackets smashed or balls sent sailing out of the stadium.

The differences between umpires, and the latitude granted to them within the rules, makes it easy to point to any given call and accuse the umpire of sexism, racism, favoritism, homerism, Fed-hating, Rafa-hating, or good old-fashioned stupidity. The rarity of point and game penalties makes Saturday night’s decisions all the more glaring, since within each umpire’s range of options, they rarely go nuclear and dock an entire game.

Some numbers

Point penalties–let alone game penalties–are so rare that it’s impossible to draw concrete conclusions. Still, let’s take a look at what we have. As far as I know, none of the ATP, WTA, ITF, or USTA have released any data on penalties, the players who receive them, or the umpires who levy them. (This would be a great time to do so, but I’m not holding my breath.) As an alternative, we can turn to the increasingly sizable dataset of the Match Charting Project (MCP), which now spans over 3,500 matches from the 2010s alone.

MCP data is not random, since matches are chosen by charters in part because of their personal interests. But in a way, that’s good for today’s purposes: MCP matches skew in the direction of notability, with a disproportionate number of finals and substantial data for top players, including over 100 matches for Serena. With those caveats in mind, let’s take a look at penalties in matches from 2010 to the present, not including Saturday’s final. The final column, “P%”, is the percent of matches in which a penalty was levied.

Category        Matches  Penalties     P%  
Women (all)        1895         13  0.69%  
Women (slams)       490          6  1.22%  
Women (finals)      228          2  0.88%
  
Men (all)          1689         16  0.95%  
Men (slams)         234          6  2.56%  
Men (finals)        371          5  1.35%

Men receive more point penalties than women in three separate comparisons: All MCP matches, matches at grand slams*, and finals. The grand slam numbers are particularly pertinent because it is the only category in which the umpires are drawn from the same pool. At other events, the ATP and WTA use separate groups of officials.

(I’m ignoring full-game penalties because there’s almost no data. In these 3,500-plus matches, there was only one instance where things escalated beyond the point penalty stage: Grigor Dimitrov’s meltdown at the 2016 Istanbul final.)

* Update: A number of people have pointed out that the grand slam comparison isn’t exactly apples-to-apples, because men play best-of-five. True. I’m not sure, however, if we should expect proportionally more penalties in longer matches. Coaching, for instance, would continue throughout a match until identified as a code violation, and then (one would hope) stop. That said, it is certainly true that on a per-point or per-set basis, the gender gap at majors is smaller than these numbers suggest, though it still leaves us with more point penalties against men.

These numbers aren’t proof of gender fairness, nor do they establish sexism against either women or men. Aside from the limited number of penalties, we know nothing about the actions that led to them, or about similar instances that didn’t trigger penalties. Perhaps men are generally more abusive to officials, so they should receive half again as many–or even more–penalties than women. I don’t know, and it’s likely that nobody else commenting on the Serena-Ramos incident knows either. Anecdotes are a key ingredient in this sort of vitriol. To firmly settle the issue, we’d need to set up a controlled study, perhaps by instructing a set of male and female players to berate umpires in identical ways and then comparing the results. As entertaining as that would be, it’s not going to happen.

None of this is to say that accusations of sexism require statistical support to be valid. They don’t. But in cases where the data is available, especially when it is possessed by some of the very organizations making accusations, it’s a shame that the numbers get ignored. The limited information available to us via the MCP indicates that men are more frequently penalized by chair umpires than women are. The USTA, ITF, and WTA could go a long way to clear up the issue–whether officials are consistently equitable or there is a pattern of harsher treatment of female players–by releasing details of all matches, including the number and causes of warnings and penalties, as well as the identity of the umpires. Alas, the more likely outcome is a few more weeks of unsubstantiated grandstanding.