New at Tennis Abstract: ATP Doubles!

At last, I’ve added ATP doubles results to player pages at Tennis Abstract. Doubles has long been relegated to second-class status by tennis analytics, largely because the data just isn’t there. Now, much more is readily available.

Tennis Abstract now has career doubles results (including Challengers, Futures, and Satellites) for thousands of ATP players, and they’ll be updated throughout each day’s play, just like singles results. Match times and traditional match stats are included for most 2016 ATP and Challenger tournaments, and I hope that will continue to be the case in 2017 and beyond.

Let me give you a brief tour of what you’ll find, using doubles legend Jack Sock as a starting point:

The big red “1” shows where to click to switch over to doubles results. For full-time doubles specialists, you won’t have to click–the site will automatically show you doubles results.

The “2” indicates three new doubles-specific filters: by partner, by opponent, and by opposing team. For instance, you can see Sock’s results with Vasek Pospisil, his eight matches against Daniel Nestor, or his twelve meetings with the Bryan Brothers. You may always combine multiple filters, so for example, you can look at Sock’s record against the Bryans only when partnering Pospisil.

There are three more new filters, marked by the big “3” toward the bottom. The “vs Hands” filter allows you to select matches against righty-righty, righty-lefty, or lefty-lefty teams. “Partner Hand” and “Partner Rank” make it possible to limit matches to those in which the partner had certain characteristics.

Finally, the “4” shows you where to access more detailed stats. Doubles results take a lot more room to display than singles results, so on the default view, the only “stats” on offer are match time and Dominance Ratio. Click on “Serve,” “Return,” or “Raw” to get the other traditional numbers, such as ace rate, first-serve points won, or break points converted. All of these numbers are totals for each team; individual player stats are almost never available for doubles matches.

I hope you enjoy this new resource. It’s something I’ve wanted for a long time, so I’m excited to be able to use it myself. There are still some minor gaps in the record, as well as some kinks in the functionality, so please be patient as I try to work all of that out.

For those of you who’d like to see WTA doubles results, as well: Me too! I can’t promise any particular deadline, but I’ve already done much of the work to build the dataset, so I’m hoping to add them to women’s player pages early this year. Stay tuned!

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