Roberto Bautista Agut got his 2020 season off to a roaring start on Saturday at the ATP Cup, knocking out the No. 2 Georgian player, Aleksandre Metreveli, by the embarrassing score of 6-0 6-0. Double bagels are extremely rare on the men’s tour, with fewer than 100 recorded in the last three decades.
About one-quarter of those 6-0 6-0 results have come in Davis Cup, the most likely venue for such an uneven matchup. Davis Cup’s reverse singles, the (largely defunct) part of the competition that pits each side’s top player against the other’s second-best, generates particularly lopsided outcomes. The ATP Cup doesn’t have that, but Bautista Agut is better than many national number ones, and Metreveli is one of the handful of competitors in Australia this week who would never otherwise feature in a tour-level event.
Still, it wasn’t quite as lopsided as all that.
The match lasted 72 minutes, longer than any of the 59 ATP double bagels for which I have match stats. It was only the fourth 6-0 6-0 result to reach the one-hour mark. The previous longest double bagel was a 65-minute contest at the 2005 Rome Masters in which Guillermo Canas battered Juan Monaco. Of the 120 women’s tour-level double bagels for which I have stats, none exceeded 67 minutes.
Counting stats
Match times can be affected by player tics and crowd conditions, but the number of points played cannot. By that measure as well, Metreveli was better than his scoreline. He kept the Spaniard on court for 97 points, longer than all but three of the previous ATP double bagels. The average 6-0 6-0 men’s match lasts only 74 points. Over 150 tour-level matches last year required 97 or fewer points, including several finals and a couple of contests that included a 7-5 set.
Another way to look at the closeness of the match is to consider break points saved. The score requires that Metreveli didn’t break serve, and that Bautista Agut did so six times. But the Georgian fought hard against the Spaniard’s return assault, saving eight break points. Only four of the 59 previous double-bagel losers withstood so many break attempts.
Double bagel chances
Bautista Agut won 83% of his service points, and Metreveli won only 40%. If those rates continued without any unusual streaks of points won or lost, that would translate to a 98.9% hold percentage for the Spaniard and a 26.4% hold percentage for the Georgian. To win all twelve games, RBA needed to hold six times and break six times. Based on these hold rates, his chances of doing so were 14.8%.
Put another way, if these two players kept playing at the same levels for a large number of matches (sorry, Aleksandre!), the score would be 6-0 6-0 only about one match out of six.
Once again, Metreveli’s performance stands out as one of the strongest to result in a double bagel. Only five of the previous 59 drubbings had such a low probability of turning out 6-0 6-0. Measured by double-bagel probability, eight matches from the 2019 season were more lopsided than this one, and only one of them ended in twelve straight games. Three of the losers managed to avoid any bagels at all:
Event Winner Loser Score DB Prob Winston Salem Fratangelo Weintraub 6-0 6-0 63.5% Los Cabos Granollers Gomez 6-0 6-1 24.6% Us Open Federer Goffin 6-2 6-2 6-0 19.9% Estoril Dav. Fokina Chardy 6-1 6-2 18.5% Acapulco Millman Gojowczyk 6-0 6-2 17.2% Rome Nadal Basilashvili 6-1 6-0 16.6% Miami Car. Baena Kudla 6-1 6-2 16.6% Tokyo Djokovic Pouille 6-1 6-2 15.5%
(Yes, Metreveli fared better against RBA than Basilashvili did against Nadal last May! The Basilashvili-Nadal rematch on Saturday was a bit closer, though.)
None of this is to say that Metreveli had a good day in his ATP Cup debut. However, double bagels are so rare that they tend to grab the headlines, pushing the details to the side. Given how the Georgian played in his ATP Cup debut, he deserved a more pedestrian loss with at least a game or two in the win column.