Category: Match charting

This one was fun.  When choosing to chart this match, I figured it was good for at least four sets, and that Kevin Anderson was likely to come out on top.  The typical Marcos Baghdatis performance this year has consisted of occasional glimpses of brilliance, mired in clunky decision-making and a pile of unforced errors.

Tonight we were treated to vintage Baghdatis, the version that packs stadiums with fans hoping to see some his trademark electric shotmaking.  Anderson may not have brought his best game, but he hit a fair number of first serves that would have gone for cheap points against most players, while Baghdatis not only got them back, he quickly turned the point to his advantage.

In 12 service games, Anderson was broken six times, most on hard courts since a 2010 match against Sam Querrey.  (Really, Sam Querrey.)  And it was Baghdatis’s most dominant performance in a Slam match since the 2006 Australian, when he beat Denis Gremelmayr, 6-2 6-1 6-2.  I seem to recall the rest of that tournament going pretty well for Marcos, too.

If the same Baghdatis shows up for Sunday’s match against Stanislas Wawrinka, that third-rounder could be a highlight of the weekend.

In the meantime, enjoy all serve and return breakdowns for both players.

Almost every one of those tables illustrates some aspect of Baghdatis’s dominance tonight.

• Anderson only won 43% of his serve points by his second shot.  Without a larger dataset to compare to, it’s tough to know just how bad that is, but look at it another way: More than half of the time, Anderson’s serve resulted in a prolonged rally.  That can’t be good.
• It’s interesting to see that both players hit several aces in both directions, both wide and down the T.  This is in contrast to Federer‘s performance the other night, in which almost all of his aces were down the T.
• Of Baghdatis’s 57 serve points, 37 were returnable.  Anderson won only nine of those points. Nine.  It’s almost pointless to break that down any further, because no subset of those return points is going to look good.
• By contrast, Baghdatis won 30 of the 45 points in which Anderson hit a returnable serve.  He only hit five unforced errors on serve returns, and got 35 of those 45 returns past the service line.

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In case you’re new to my serve and return breakdowns, here are the previous ones:

• Hantuchova-Duval
• Baker-Hewitt
• Federer-Zemlja

Tonight I logged every point of the second-round match between Daniela Hantuchova and Vicky Duval.  It didn’t end up being very close, but Duval showed off some of the baseline skills that got her into the second round, while Hantuchova displayed the powerful serving and speed that kept her in the top 30 for so long.

Here is the complete breakdown. Tonight, we have both serves and returns.

Over the next few days, I’m hoping to come up with similar breakdowns for rally endings, shot types, and just about all the other numbers you can imagine crunching when you’ve charted every shot of a tennis match.  Stay tuned.  Maybe I’ll even try to make the presentation a little easier on the eyes.  (But don’t bet on it.)

Here’s the trouble with jotting down the details of every single shot in a tennis match: When you’re done, you have details about every single shot in the tennis match.

If you saw my post yesterday presenting serve profiles for Federer and Zemlja, you already have some idea of what I’m talking about.  When you can chop up each player’s performance a thousand different ways, it seems like a waste to ignore any possibility.

Here we go again.

I charted tonight’s match between Brian Baker and Lleyton Hewitt, two of the more electric baseliners in today’s game.  Hewitt doesn’t have much of a serve, and while Baker can crush his share of aces, he’s rarely consistent enough to shut down his opponent’s return game.

Here’s all the data I could think to generate regarding their return games tonight.

(Seriously, click the link.  I’m only writing this post as an excuse to show off what’s on the other side of that link.)

Here are some tidbits of interest I’ve noted from the data:

• Hewitt is remarkably consistent, winning about the same number of return points in the deuce and ad courts, and against all types of serves except for those down the T.  (As we saw yesterday, Federer got almost all of his aces down the T, and that is probably true for most players.  Thus, returners will look weak in that category.)
• Baker didn’t take much advantage of shallow returns.  Hewitt won more than half of the points in which he failed to get the return past Baker’s service line.
• While Baker did a better job of hitting deep returns (80% past the service line), he wasn’t nearly as successful (winning only 29% of points) when his returns fell in the service box.  That’s probably a credit to Hewitt more than a knock on Baker.
• Neither player sliced or chipped returns unless they absolutely had to.  Baker sliced less than 10% of his returns, and Hewitt barely 5% of his.
• Baker loves his down-the-line backhand.  His five down-the-line return winners accounted for half of his total return winners, and they also represent half of his down-the-line returns.

Go look at the tables, let your eyes adjust for a minute, and then tell me if you find anything else interesting.

As I wrote last week, tennis needs more detailed statistics.  Most of all, we need them in an open format so that researchers can utilize all the data stored for every match.  No use in have Hawkeye cameras on every court if the data stays locked up.

I’m working on a system for charting matches and storing extremely detailed serve and shot information.  It will have to stay under wraps until I get a few more kinks worked out, but in the meantime, I want to show off some of what it can do.

Click here for more exhaustive serve data than you’ve probably ever seen before.

Today’s match wasn’t the most gripping that Roger Federer (or Grega Zemlja) ever played, but there’s still plenty of interesting stuff:

• Roger won 85% of first-serve points. No surprised there.  More impressively, he won 60% of his first-serve points on or before his second shot.  (That’s “<=3W” in the tables.)
• Fed went down the T with just under half his first serves (47%), but up-the-middle offerings accounted for 11 of his 12 aces.
• Zemlja hit a shocking 27 serves into the net–almost half of his faults, and just over 20% of all of the serves he hit today.  (Watching the match, it felt like even more.)
• Roger’s first serves were somewhat more dominant in the deuce court, as he lost only three first-serve points in that half, and won two-thirds of his first-serve points in the deuce court by his second shot.  In the small amount of data on offer today, he was noticeably weaker with his deuce court second serve, losing 5 of 12 second-serve points in that direction, compared to only 3 of 18 second-serve points to the ad court.
• Zemlja fared better serving to the ad court today (64% of service points won to 56% in the deuce court), and was particularly deadly when he landed a serve wide in the ad court.  He won seven of the eight points that started that way, five of them with or before his second shot.

(If you didn’t click on the link the first time you saw it, now would be a good time.)

You get the idea, I hope.  With this much data, the sifting is as important as the collecting.  There are hundreds of data points we can generate just from tracking each player’s serve performance, and we can expect that most of them won’t have much to tell us.

And, of course, one match is just that–a small sample, fewer than 100 service points for each player.  While we can look at these tables and gain some insight into exactly how Roger was dominant today, it would be a mistake to draw much in the way of broader conclusions.

For that, we’ll need more matches, more data.  We’ll get there.