jsackmann – Page 110 – Heavy Topspin

Sao Paulo Challenger: Day One

Happy new year, fellow tennis geeks!

By chance, I found myself in Sao Paulo at the same time as the beginning of the first challenger of 2013. Plenty of challengers these days are streamed online, so if you really want to see these guys play, you can swing it, but there’s still some magic to watching the action live.

Ok, well, “magic” might be a little strong for the first round of a South American challenger. You know what I mean.

Before I dig into my notes on specific players, a couple of general issues:

Brazilian style. Brazil hasn’t had a major tennis star since the retirement of Gustavo Kuerten. Many of the highest-ranked Brazilians are in Sao Paulo this week–on hard courts. While Brazil, like the rest of South America, has traditionally been associated with clay courts, that is changing. The 2016 Olympics event will be held on a hard surface, and Sao Paulo has hosted the challenger tour finals on indoor hard courts.

In time, I wouldn’t be surprised to see hard-court specialists emerge from this country and make an impact at the top range of the ATP rankings. Many of the Brazilians kicking around the 100-200 range (Joao Souza, Rogerio Dutra Silva, Ricardo Hocevar) have an unworkable combination of hard-court games and clay-court tactics. These aren’t Argentinian-style dirtballers–they back up their booming serves with aggressive groundstrokes and are rarely spotted more than a few feet behind the baseline. But they still aren’t as aggressive as their games merit. While Thomaz Bellucci has had the most success of his generation, his game has some of the same limitations.

As we’ll see in a moment, the next generation of Brazilians might have more pure hard-court success. The additional hard-court exposure they are getting at home these days can’t hurt.

No-let serving. Finally, the ATP is following the lead of World Team Tennis and the NCAA … at least a little bit. For the first quarter of this year, Challenger tournaments will abandon the “let” rule on serves. If the ball lands in, it’s good, regardless of whether it made contact with the net.

In seven hours of tennis yesterday, I expected to see plenty of awkwardness around the no-let rule, since players haven’t had much time to adjust. But that wasn’t the case. Only once did a serve dribble over the net cord for an easy ace. One or two other times the server had a late reaction, hitting a weak defensive return that he might improve on in another few weeks. For the most part, the no-let rule didn’t raise an eyebrow.

The advantages are minor but very real. I don’t think any fans like to see players argue pointlessly with chair umpires, and lets (real and imagined) have always been a source of friction. No-let serving gives us smoother matches with fewer of those sorts of hiccups.

Now, on to the matches.

Guilherme Clezar (BRA) vs Thiago Monteiro (BRA)

The future of Brazilian tennis got off to an early start this morning. Clezar, 20, was the top-ranked teenager in the world until his birthday yesterday. Monteiro, 18, is the third-ranked 18-year-old in the world.

Both players have monster games, with big serves and crushing groundstrokes. Monteiro, in particular, is capable of doing violence to the ball on his first offering. And in fact, frequently Monteiro looked like the superior player, comfortably running around forehands to hit winners on tight angles. But in this match, Clezar was the wily veteran, somehow breaking twice for the 6-4 6-4 win.

For all of Monteiro’s potential, he was erratic. His low service toss led to a few patches of missed first serves. He lost his temper and earned a ball abuse violation when failing to run down a drop shot on an unimportant point early in the second set.

By comparison, Clezar played the part of the wily veteran. The ball didn’t make quite as much noise off of his racquet, but he still hits awfully hard. While Monteiro is a pure hard-courter, Clezar comes closer to the mold I mentioned above, using hard-court weapons in an occasionally clay-court manner.

Clezar’s groundstrokes were surprisingly varied, often dropping two or three forehands in a row within inches of the baseball, then hitting a heavier topspin shot that dropped short. For all of his capabilities, though, he missed a lot of opportunities to follow up a strong serve with an equally aggressive second or third shot. In this match, it didn’t stop him; against better players, it’s a major area for improvement.

Clezar’s impressive ranking (for a just-turned 20-year-old) is no mirage–he has the highest ceiling of any player I saw yesterday. He has the raw tools for a Nicolas Almagro type of game; the next few years will show us whether he can be that good.

Diego Sebastian Schwartzman (ARG) vs Marcelo Demoliner (BRA)

The 20-year-old Schwartzman had an epic season at the futures level last year, and finally made any impact at higher levels in winning the Buenos Aires Challenger late last year. Seeing him on a hard court, it’s tough to imagine him stringing those wins together.

The Argentine is short–5’6″ on the high side. And while he does a lot with the limited tools he’s been given, he has a long way to go to get to the level of a once-in-a-generation talent like Olivier Rochus. Schwartzman has the weakest serve I’ve ever seen in professional tennis, not putting much on first serves, but still frequently missing them. He doesn’t even use a great deal of spin.

Demoliner, a big Brazilian who looks a bit like Juan Martin Del Potro, is hardly a top talent, but he didn’t have any trouble putting Schwartzman away. To his credit, as the match progressed, he took a bit of gas off the serve and went for angles and spin, often leaving the Argentine to swing (and occasionally miss) at balls above his head.

The best comp for Schwartzman is probably Juan Ignacio Chela … with the caveat that Chela is tall. Given the opportunity, I would imagine DSS sits back as far as he can go and outlasts his opponents. It was clear yesterday that he’s very steady on the ground and is mentally strong for a 20-year-old, staying relatively focused under an attack he’s wasn’t going to overcome. On slow clay, that’s a recipe for success, at least in challengers. On any hard court, it’s barely worth showing up. Indeed, it was only his fourth career pro match on hard, moving his record to 0-4.

Despite winning this match, Demoliner didn’t do much to impress. As noted, he served intelligently, and often looked good coming forward, but he needed to be dragged to the net. Again, we see a Brazilian with a big game who is reluctant to use it.

Martin Alund (ARG) vs Fabiano De Paula (BRA)

In pushing his ranking up to a career-high 119 last year, Alund played only two matches off of clay–first-round losses Wimbledon and US Open qualies. For all that, he seemed surprisingly comfortable on hard courts.

That isn’t to say he was any more aggressive than the battalion of Brazilians I’ve commented on so far. He has some of the tools for it, especially a big serve that he is able to effortlessly place in the wide corner. His biggest advantage yesterday, though, was an opponent even less well-suited for the surface than he was.

De Paula occasionally looked great, stepping inside the baseline to hit one-handed backhand winners, and mixing in some impressive serving of his own. More typically, you could see him four feet behind the baseline wondering what to do next. Despite Alund’s passivity, De Paula proved he could play even more conservative tennis, squandering opportunities and trying to win 15-shot rallies that tended to end with an error on the 7th shot.

Alund, at 27, is unlikely to advance much further in the rankings, though he could easily hang around his current ranking by continuing his success in South American challengers. De Paula has yet to break into the top 200, and he will need a new game plan if he’s going to help out his ranking with his hard-court performance.

Pedro Sousa (POR) vs Marco Trungelliti (ARG)

After watching so many players squander their firepower with poor tactics on Sao Paulo’s fast courts, it was refreshing to watch Trungelliti, a classic dirtballer who seemed happily unaware that he wasn’t playing on dirt. Ultimately, he fell to Sousa in three sets, but by simply playing his game–unsuitable as it was–he looked more assured on the surface than the majority of others in the draw.

Sousa wasn’t comfortable at all. He hit great shots, especially forehand winners from every position in every direction. In trying, he sent balls sailing in every direction outside of the lines, as well. He gave every evidence of mental instability as well, incessantly chattering at himself, and once standing at the net for 30 seconds trying to hit a ball to a ballboy with the grip of his racquet.

Both players, but especially Sousa, looked great when hitting groundstrokes in their strike zone; in less natural contact points, the results were less predictable. Sousa’s forehand and Trungelliti’s two-hander could be particularly impressive.

Austin Krajicek (USA) vs Patricio Heras (ARG)

One final note, on a qualifying match that kicked off the day. Three and a half years ago, I saw Krajicek in his first professional match, at US Open qualifying. I left with a negative impression of an immature teenager with nothing like the game it would take to compete professionally, but then again, he was 18.

After a few years at Texas A&M, Krajicek is more mature, and has a few weapons that make him competitive at the challenger level. But his game still seems awfully small for contemporary pro tennis. Some first serves were strong, yet every second serve was weakly spun in. He crushed some forehands, but almost every backhand was a defensive slice. In a first-set tiebreak, he came to the net four times … only once behind a sufficiently good approach.

At 22, Krajicek has more time to develop, but for now, he’s far down the list of young Americans to watch.

Known Unknowns for Rafael Nadal

When Rafael Nadal returns to the tour–very soon, we hope–he will be entering uncharted territory. Plenty of players miss time to injury, but it is rare for a top player to miss anywhere near this much time.

In fact, only three top 10-ranked players have ever left the tour and returned after a layoff of six months or longer.

Only one of those three–Juan Martin del Potro, in 2010–was forced to rest due to injury. John McEnroe twice left the tour for stretches of several months, and Tommy Haas took time off in 2002 to take care of his family. Haas’s layoff turned into something a bit more relevant, as his sabbatical was extended by a shoulder injury he suffered in preparation for a comeback.

While del Potro’s future is still unclear, the precedent for Nadal is concerning. None of those players ever returned to their pre-layoff rankings.

Del Potro’s story, in fact, is the most encouraging. When he suffered his shoulder injury, he had recently won the US Open and reached the final of the World Tour Finals, reaching a career-high ranking of #5. With the exception of a brief return in October of 2010, he missed almost exactly one year. While he didn’t return to the top 10 for another year, he won two small tournaments early on and reached the semifinals of Indian Wells barely two months into his comeback. Two years later, his ranking is up to #7, still short of his pre-injury peak.

When Haas left the tour at the end of 2002, he had just recently fallen from his career-high ranking of #2. When he returned more than a year later, he had early success similar to Del Potro’s, reaching the 4th round at Indian Wells and winning two events in his first six months. Yet he didn’t return to the top 10 for nearly three years.

McEnroe is the enigma of this bunch. Ranked #2 in the world at the beginning of 1986, he needed a break from the tour. Seven months later, he began a comeback at Stratton Mountain, where he reached the semis and lost to Boris Becker. After a clunker of a first-round loss at the US Open, he reeled off 18 consecutive wins, including three over top-10 players. That put him back in the top 10, but it was two years into the comeback that he regained a position in the top 5–in part due to another six-month layoff beginning in September 1987.

Aging patterns

What the recaps of Haas’s and McEnroe’s layoffs hide is that, while they weren’t playing, they were headed into an age range where most pros start declining. At the time of their returns, McEnroe was 26, Haas 25–a typical player’s peak age, at least before today’s new era of indestructible 30-somethings.

While McEnroe has shown astonishing longevity, his years as a contender for world #1 were probably about over when he took his sabbaticals. And Haas missed the year in which he might have played his very best tennis.

Neither player is a clear precedent for a clay court genius with knee problems, but the age factor is tough to ignore. Nadal turned 26 in June, putting him right in between Haas and McEnroe at the times of their departures from the tour.

Assuming Rafa is healthy, there’s little doubt he’ll maintain his position in the top 10. I’d be surprised if he didn’t win at least a couple of clay court events this year, even if he maintains a much-reduced schedule. But if history is any indication, he has seen the last of the top two.

A Quarter of Missing Challengers

The ATP Challenger calendar (PDF) has been released for the first quarter of 2013, and it looks mighty thin.

In the next three months, we can expect 21 challenger events, compared to 30 in Q1 2012 and 33 in Q1 2011. (Thanks to Foot Soldiers of Tennis for raising the issue.) For those challenger fans among us, that’s clearly bad news. Less competitive tennis always is. It could also hurt many up-and-coming players, which means it should concern all fans of men’s tennis.

For the last twenty years, challenger tennis has generally been on the rise, with 147 tournaments at that level last year compared to only 88 in 1992. The number peaked in 2007 and 2008 with 173 and 175 challenger events, respectively.

However, while the challenger circuit has grown in size and importance, the ATP tour has shrunk. Most of that movement occurred more than a decade ago. The tour has remained steady with between 65 and 67 events each year since 2002. As recently as 1994, though, there were 90 ATP events, which offered 36% more main draw places than did 2012’s 65 tournaments.

In other words, the growth of the challenger tour hasn’t substantially expanded opportunities for players outside the sport’s elite, it has simply filled the gap left by all those missing ATP events. The number of challengers increased by 35% from 1992 to 2002, but the number of main draw places in ATP and challenger tourneys combined rose by only 6%. Account for the reduction of tour-level qualifying events, and you probably have a net loss in point- and money-earning opportunities for tour pros.

The following five years brought the explosion of challengers noted above, but the pullback to 2012’s level of 65 ATP and 147 challenger events has reduced the field to only 7432 total main draw places, a 9.5% increase over ten years earlier.

A 10% jump over the course of a decade may be enough to keep pace with the global spread of tennis, but it won’t be if the current downward trend persists.

That’s the reason for concern. 21 first-quarter challengers represents a 30% decrease from 2012. Drop 30% of the challenger events from the entire 2012 calendar, and you have only 103 events, the lowest number since 1996, where there were 97 challengers but a whopping 84 tour-level tournaments.

The ripple effect

So, when the size of the top-tier tennis world shrinks, who suffers?

Small as these paydays are, when the number of challenger-tour paydays drops, some fringe-level players earn fewer of them. The relevant “fringe” here is the ranking range between 200 and 300, the guys who often make the main draw cut of a challenger when there were two or three in one week, but are relegated to a futures or (unpaid) qualifying draw when there is only one.

Less obvious is that even the top-ranked challenger-level contenders suffer. Fewer tournaments generally means more travel–that is, greater travel expenses. For Roger Federer, that’s just a different balance on his NetJets account. For Diego Schwartzman, it means more weeks where he loses money playing competitive tennis, and fewer upper-level events that are feasible opportunities for him.

Needless to say, there are far more Schwartzmans than there are Federers.

And that brings us to the groups that really get hurt when the tennis calendar shrinks: Those who pay many of their own costs and those who don’t live in hotbeds of tennis.

Players who are heavily supported by the USTA might object to additional flight time, but they don’t feel the pain of travel expenses. Someone who can easily reach the plethora of challenger events in Western Europe will find it easy to reach plenty of playing opportunities. An up-and-comer in the the US and Australia will get just as many wild cards as he would have five or ten years ago.

But competitors from much of South America, the Balkans, and the former USSR often do not have any of those things going for them. With every loss of a net-profitable playing opportunity, those guys are a little less likely to stick with professional tennis. If Gregoire Burquier decided to pack it in, most tennis fans wouldn’t notice. But what about the next Radek Stepanek, who ten years ago was within a whisker of running out of money and hanging up the racquet?

Let’s hope the decrease in challengers early in 2013 is a blip, not a trend. It isn’t something anyone will talk about in the next big debate about prize money, but the quality of tennis and all professional levels depends on it.

If Rafa Only Plays on Clay

Since suffering the injury that would lead him to miss the second half of 2012, Rafael Nadal has said that he may have to cut back his tournament schedule so that he plays fewer matches on hard courts.

For someone who wants to remain at the top of the game, that’s a tough ask. The majority of ATP ranking points come from hard-court tournaments. If Rafa stuck to the clay, he would only be able to contest one of the four majors.

Becoming a full-time clay courter would almost certainly knock Nadal out of the running for world #1. (As well as give him plenty of R&R in Mallorca.) But how bad is it? Let’s consider the possibility that in some future season, he only plays on clay.

Here is a possible 2013 schedule for a clay-only player, along with each event’s ranking points. Three 250s are on this schedule, placed to provide warm-ups after each multi-week layoff:

20-Feb  Buenos Aires   250   
27-Feb  Acapulco       500   
09-Apr  Casablanca     250   
16-Apr  Monte Carlo    1000  
23-Apr  Barcelona      500   
07-May  Madrid         1000  
14-May  Rome           1000  
28-May  Roland Garros  2000  
09-Jul  Stuttgart      250   
16-Jul  Hamburg        500

If Rafa ran the table and won all of those events, that’s 7000 ranking points (only two of the 250s would count). Unless the rest of the field becomes much more level, that won’t be good enough for the #1 ranking. But it is a greater point total than Rafa has right now, and it would keep him in the top four. Even averaging finalist points for these 10 events would allow him to remain in the top eight.

(Getting credit for those tournament wins would be a little trickier. Players are required to show up for at least 4 500-level events, including one after the US Open. If you only play on clay, there are no options. To avoid the dreaded “zero-pointer” for not playing, Rafa might have to contest, say, Valencia. However, points from those events no longer automatically count as one of a player’s top 18 events, so as long as the requirement was met, Rafa’s six non-slam, non-required-Masters events could be Monte Carlo, Acapulco, Barcelona, Hamburg, and two 250s.)

In practice, it’s tough to imagine that Rafa (or anyone else, short of Alessio Di Mauro) would avoid hard-court events entirely. Much more likely is a scenario in which he plays all the clay court events possible and competes in hard-court events only when he feels sufficiently healthy. That might mean an occasional semifinal run; it probably also means more second-round exits.

As unlikely and unusual as it would be, the all-clay schedule may be Nadal’s best route to setting more records. With fewer injuries and much more rest, it’s easy to imagine him racking up another four or five French Open titles, along with perhaps ten more Masters crowns. It would be an unusual career trajectory, to be sure, but it would also generate more fodder for the next ten years of GOAT debates.

The Speed of Every Surface, Redux

One of the most popular posts on this blog has been this one, which quantified the speed of every ATP tournament’s surface. At the very least, it’s time to provide some updated numbers. Beyond that, we can improve on the methodology and say more about how much we can learn from the numbers.

I was prompted to improve the methodology when I ran an update this week to see how fast the courts are at the O2 Arena in London. The algorithm, which compares the number of aces (or service points won, or first service points won) to the number we’d expect from those players based on their season average, told me that London is much slower than average–almost 20% below average, on par with Roland Garros and the pre-blue clay Madrid Masters.

Counterintuitive conclusions are fun, but that’s just wrong.

Here’s the problem: Service stats aren’t only affected by servers. Sure, when Milos Raonic is serving, there will be more aces than when Mikhail Youzhny is serving. But how many aces Raonic hits is also influenced by the returning skills of the man on the other side of the net. It’s clear why the algorithm got London so wrong: The eight or nine best players in the world got to where they are (in part, anyway) by getting more balls back. No matter how fast the court, Mardy Fish wasn’t going to hit as many aces past Jo Wilfried Tsonga or Rafael Nadal in London as he did against Bernard Tomic in Shanghai or Tokyo.

I’ll be more succinct. The goal is to compare the number of aces on a particular surface to the number of aces we’d expect on a neutral surface. The number of Expected aces depends on more than just the man serving; it also depends on the man receiving.

(In my article last year, I used three different stats (ace rate, first serve winning percentage, and overall winning percentage on serve) to measure surface speed. They track each other fairly closely, so there’s not a lot of additional value gained by using more than one. From here on out, I’m measuring surface speed only by relative ace rate.)

Incorporating more data

To factor in the additional variable, we need each player’s ace rate for the season along with his ace against rate. With those two numbers, together with the overall ATP average, we can apply the odds ratio method to get a better idea of each match’s expected aces.

For each server in each match, we compare his actual aces to his expected aces, and then take the average of all of those ratios. The tournament-wide average gives us an estimate of how fast the courts played at that event.

The improved algorithm still insists that aces were 3% lower than on a neutral surface at the 2011 Tour Finals, but counters that with the conclusion that aces were 18% and 8% more than on a neutral surface in 2009 and 2010, respectively. A weighted average of those three seasons (more on that in a bit) estimates that the O2 Arena gives us 4% more aces than a neutral surface.

The variance from year to year–in some cases, like that of London, suggesting that a surface is faster than average one year, slower than average the next–is a bit worrisome. At the very least, we can’t simply take a one-year calculation for a single tournament and treat it as the final word, especially when the event only includes 15 matches.

Multi-year averages and (extremely mild) projections

If we want to know exactly what happened in one edition of a tournament, the single-year number is instructive. Perhaps the weather, or the lighting, was very bad or very good, causing an unusually high or low number of aces. Just because a tournament’s number for 2012 doesn’t match its numbers for any of the previous three years doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

However, the variety of effects that give us this year-to-year variance do warn us that last year’s number will not accurately predict this year’s number.

The year-to-year correlation of relative ace rate (as I’ve described it above), is not very strong (r = .35). One way to modestly improve it is to use a three-year weighted average. A 3/2/1 weighted average of 2011, 2010, and 2009 numbers gives us a better forecast of how the surface will play in the following year (r = .5).

Another way of looking at these more reliable forecasts is that they get closer to isolating the effect of the surface. As I noted in last year’s article, the weather effects of Hurricane Irene dampened the ace rate at last year’s US Open. By my new algorithm, the ace rate last year was 7% lower than a neutral surface, while this year it was 5% higher than a neutral surface. The three-year weighted average would have been able to look past Irene; using data from 2009-11, it estimated that courts in Flushing were exactly neutral. That not only turned out to be a better projection for 2012 than the -7% of 2011, it also probably better described the influence of the court surface, as separate from the weather conditions.

Below the jump, find the complete list of all tour-level events that have been played in 2011 and/or 2012. The first four numerical columns show the relative ace rate for each year from 2009 to 2012. For instance, in Costa Do Sauipe this year, there were a staggering 61% more aces than expected. The final two columns show the weighted averages for 2011 and 2012. Each event’s “2012 Wgt” is my best estimate of the current state of the surface and how it will play next year.

I’ve also created a prettier, sortable version of the same table.

Continue reading The Speed of Every Surface, Redux

The Influence of a First-Set Tiebreak

Italian translation at settesei.it

In the first two rounds of last week’s Paris Masters, 12 matches began with a first-set tiebreak. Of those dozen matches, nine of them finished as straight-set wins, with the second set more decisive than the first. Polish qualifier Jerzy Janowicz won both of his first two matches according to this pattern.

This isn’t exactly what we’d expect. A tiebreak isn’t purely random, but it’s close. And if two players have reached a tiebreak, the available evidence suggests that they are playing at about the same level. Thus, the winner of the first set is more likely to win the match–and perhaps a bit more likely to win the second set–but not so highly likely to find it easier going in the following set.

Anecdotally, this seems like a familiar pattern. Tough fight in the first set, then the tiebreak winner cruises in the second–perhaps due to his own momentum, perhaps because the first-set loser stops trying so hard.

And it is fairly common. Since 2000, about 9% of tour-level best-of-threes are straight set wins in which a tiebreak is followed by a more decisive set. When the first set is decided by a tiebreak, by far the most frequent outcome (roughly half of these matches) is a straight set victory where the second set is more decisive than the first.

Evidence or forecast?

So what does it mean? Does winning a first-set tiebreak actually give a player the boost he needs to run away with the second? Or are first-set tiebreaks evidence that the tiebreak winner was the better player all along, suggesting that we could have forecast the ensuing 6-3 or 6-4 set before the match even started?

We won’t arrive at a clear answer to this question, but we can try to get closer.

To give us some context, let’s start by comparing matches with first-set tiebreaks to the overall pool of best-of-three contests since 2000:

In best-of-threes, the first-set winner wins in straight sets 66.1% of the time. If the first set is decided by a tiebreak, the first-set winner takes the match in straights 60.5% of the time.
In all best-of-threes, the first-set winner wins the second set by at least one break (that is, without needing to play a breaker) 57.1% of the time. If the first set was a tiebreak, the first-set winner wins the second set by at least one break 50.0% of the time.
The first set winner loses a best-of-three match 18.0% of the time. If the first set is decided by a tiebreak, he loses 22.3% of the time.

Clearly, first-set tiebreaks indicate closer matches than average. (You probably didn’t need me to crunch the numbers to tell you that.) It’s still far from clear whether the first-set tiebreak gives the winning player a boost, or it simply reflects the balance between the two competitors.

Factoring favorite status

To isolate the effect of player skill, let’s look at matches with first-set tiebreaks, divided into four categories determined by how much the first-set winner was favored:

             Straights  Easy 2nd   Loss  
Underdogs        48.5%     39.3%  33.8%  
Even(ish)        61.2%     51.4%  19.2%  
Favorite         69.4%     57.3%  14.1%  
Extreme Fav      74.1%     62.0%   9.2%

No surprises here. The more the first-set tiebreak winner is favored, the more likely he is to win the match in straight sets, the more likely he is to win the second set by at least one break, and the less likely he is to lose the match.

More importantly, a bit more crunching of these numbers shows that almost all–at least 80%–of the variation in these three percentages is determined by the relative skill levels of the two players. It’s possible that a bit of the remainder can be ascribed to the lingering effects of a tight first-set triumph, but only possible, and only a bit.

A story for every sequence

I suggested at the outset that this pattern–7-6, 6-something–seems like a familiar one. And of course it is, because there are only so many score permutations in best-of-three matches.

When we watch such a match, it’s easy to come up with a narrative that seems universal. “Federer won the last three points of the tiebreak, leaving Isner looking overmatched. No one was surprised when Isner got broken for the first time in the following game.” The simple story accurately reflects at least part of the match, explains the scoreline, and it’s tempting to theorize that (a) Isner’s break was due to his loss of the first-set tiebreak, and (b) players generally suffer an early break in the second set after losing a tiebreak.

Fine. Except often (just as often?), we have reason to construct another narrative: “Murray won the last three points of the tiebreak, leaving Tsonga looking overmatched. No one was surprised, though, when Murray came out a bit stale in the second set and got broken for the first time in the following game.”

Some stories reflect actual trends, and that’s why so many of my posts on this site investigate the most popular stories. But for any given story, it’s more likely than not that it has been constructed simply to give a bit more meaning to underlying randomness.

Janko Tipsarevic and the Masters of Retirement

When Janko Tipsarevic retired six points away from defeat against Jerzy Janowicz on Friday, many tennis fans were … unsurprised. The Serb has quite the record when it comes to quitting early, having retired from matches at all four Grand Slams, the Olympics, and nearly half of the Masters 1000 events. He has retired on every surface and in every round.

It’s hardly a record to be proud of. Tipsarevic’s departure on Friday was his 17th career tour-level retirement–about 1 in every 25 matches over his 434-match career. His “retirement rate” of 3.9% is the highest among active players with at least 400 matches. It’s more than double the tour average of about 1.5%.

But that “at least 400” hides some context. Expand the field to a still-respectable minimum of 200 tour-level matches and we have the following leaders in career retirement rate:

Player              Matches  Ret Rate  
Sergiy Stakhovsky       209      4.8%  
Michael Llodra          370      4.6%  
Yen Hsun Lu             222      4.5%  
Janko Tipsarevic        434      3.9%  
Denis Istomin           211      3.8%  
Paul Henri Mathieu      456      3.7%  
Filippo Volandri        367      3.5%  
Potito Starace          347      3.5%  
Xavier Malisse          531      3.0%  
Viktor Troicki          300      3.0%

Tipsy is still a standout, yet not an egregious one. Both Paul Henri Mathieu and Xavier Malisse have retired in three of the four slams. Michael Llodra has dropped out of Wimbledon three times, and the US Open twice. (Not to mention retiring against Jo Wilfried Tsonga three times, and perhaps more remarkably, against both Tipsarevic and Mathieu.)

For a fuller view of the state of ATP retirement–including the 22 members of the top 100 who have never done so–click here for a sortable table with more fun stats. (A few numbers are different than above, because my full database doesn’t yet include 2012 Bercy.) Janko may quit early, but that doesn’t mean you have to.

The 2012 World Tour Finals Forecast

With Jo Wilfried Tsonga‘s win last night over Nicolas Almagro, the field is set for the tour finals. Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer will each head one of the two round robin groups, and will be joined by Andy Murray, David Ferrer, Tomas Berdych, Juan Martin Del Potro, Tsonga, and Janko Tipsarevic.

Despite Federer’s dominance on indoor hard courts last year, he is hardly the same unstoppable force this season. Not only did he lose in last week’s final to Del Potro, but my rating algorithm, Jrank, views him as a slightly inferior hard-court player to Murray. Though it will certainly be close, my forecast favors both the Serb and the Brit over the soon-to-be world #2:

Player         SF      F      W  
Djokovic    77.7%  47.7%  28.8%  
Murray      70.0%  41.9%  23.3%  
Federer     72.6%  40.4%  22.3%  
Del Potro   45.9%  20.2%   8.3%  
Ferrer      45.4%  17.7%   6.5%  
Berdych     38.8%  15.2%   5.5%  
Tsonga      30.4%  11.3%   3.8%  
Tipsarevic  19.2%   5.5%   1.5%

As always, there are as many reasons to question these numbers as there are to put one’s faith in them. Djokovic’s loss to Sam Querrey this week seriously questions his current ability to play his best tennis. Murray’s loss to rising star Jerzy Janowicz isn’t quite so troubling, but it also fails to fit the profile of a dominant player.

In the bottom half of the pack, one or two of these guys are likely to play in the Paris final, meaning they’ll be relatively tired upon arrival in London. It’s one thing to play the first round of a tournament on weak legs; it’s another when that event is the Tour Finals and your first opponent is a fellow top-tenner.

[UPDATE, 3 Nov]

The draw is set. Federer is joined in Group B with Ferrer, Del Potro, and Tipsarevic, leaving Djokovic with Murray, Berdych, and Tsonga. This is a dream setup for Federer, and even dreamier for Delpo.

Federer’s career H2H against the three men in his group is 31-3. His career H2H against Novak’s opponents is 27-18. He might prefer not to face Del Potro again so soon, but historically, the Argentine hasn’t been any more dangerous for Roger than any of the three men Djokovic will have to face.

As noted, it’s the absolute perfect draw for Delpo, too. Statistically, Federer is weaker than Djokovic. My numbers might overstate Ferrer’s competitiveness in London (and they still aren’t very high), and Tipsarevic is essentially a non-factor. In the pre-draw simulation above, Del Potro has a 45.9% chance of reaching the semis and a 8.3% chance of winning it all. Post-draw, 54.4% and 9.2%. It’s an uphill battle no matter what the draw, but avoiding the Murray group is a huge help.

Here are the projections, now reflecting the draw:

Player         SF      F      W  
Djokovic    74.0%  47.2%  28.2%  
Federer     76.7%  41.2%  23.0%  
Murray      68.5%  41.6%  22.6%  
Del Potro   54.4%  22.4%   9.2%  
Ferrer      46.9%  17.9%   6.8%  
Berdych     31.2%  13.5%   5.0%  
Tsonga      26.3%  10.4%   3.6%  
Tipsarevic  22.1%   5.8%   1.6%

Thanks to his relatively weak round-robin group, Federer has the best shot at reaching the semis, but only the third best chance of reaching the final, since he’s likely to face either Djokovic or Murray in his semi. Despite the tougher draw, Djokovic remains the favorite to win the event and put an exclamation point on his season-ending #1 ranking.

(A quick programming note for regular readers: I won’t be able to update these predictions throughout the tournament on TennisAbstract.com, and due to an uncooperative travel schedule, the next TA.com update (including Bercy results) may not occur until Tuesday or Wednesday.)

Bouncing Back From a Bagel

Yesterday, Sam Querrey posted an unusual achievement and did so in an unusual way. He beat soon-to-be-#1 Novak Djokovic–a career milestone no matter how it happened. And he did it after losing the first set 6-0.

This was only the fifth time in his ATP-level career that Querrey lost a set 6-0 (though it was the second time in two weeks), and it was the first time he was bageled in the first set. Big servers like Sam aren’t generally found on either end of a bagel, since their style of play tends to ensure that both players win a service game or two. Querrey has only bageled other players five times on tour. Oddly enough, three of those have been in Los Angeles.

However rare 6-0 sets are, the shocking thing here is that he bounced back. Not just in the sense that he recovered from the mental blow of winning a mere 10 of 35 first-set points, but that he won two sets from a player who seemed to be so vastly superior to him on court.

As you might imagine, that doesn’t happen very often. Of about 2100 best-of-three matches this year through the end of last week, 58 began with a bagel. The first-set loser only came back to win three of those 58 times. And of course, the losers in those three-setters were hardly of Djokovic’s caliber: Peter Polansky, Maximo Gonzalez, and Jarkko Nieminen. (It wasn’t the first time for the Finn–he lost a match 6-0, 6-7, 6-7 in 2009.)

A bit of context

2012 has been a tough year for the victims of first-set bagels. When we expand our focus to the entire 21st century, it turns out that first-set bagels have been occurring at a typical rate this year–about 2.5%, or 1 in 40 matches–but that players are finding it tougher to bounce back.

In best-of-three matches over the last thirteen seasons, there have been 753 first-set bagels. The winner closed it out in straight sets 568, or 75.3%, of those times. The rate this year has been almost identical, with straight-set wins finishing off 43 of the 58 matches with first-set bagels.

In the remaining matches, the underdogs have historically found easier going. Over the last thirteen years, the player who lost the first set 0-6 managed to come back and win the match 75 times–about once every ten matches. This year, Querrey was only the fourth (of 59, now) to do so.

What’s most interesting about the historical total of 75 is that is not much less than the number of matches that the first-set winner wins in three sets.

Let me put that another way. Since 2000, the player who was bageled in the first set has come back to win the second set 185 times. Since the vast majority of those second set scores are 7-6, 7-5, and 6-4, the first-set winner almost always had a more dominant run than the second set winner. But that once-dominant first-set win only wins three-setters 40% of the time.

As we’ve seen, Querrey was only the fourth player to complete the comeback this year, though he was the 13th to reach a third set. Based on the previous rate, we should have seen another couple of recoveries from an 0-6 start.

Winning the second set, as Querrey did today, doesn’t exactly put the comebacker on equal footing, but recent history shows that we can’t put too much weight on that outlier of a first set. Perhaps 6-0s are simply too extreme to carry much weight. Or perhaps winning the second set–even if it’s a much tighter margin than the first–provides a boost that carries over into the third set.

In any event, players should take heart in the knowledge that after dropping the first set 6-0, all is not lost. But Querrey, who has now been bageled more in the last two weeks than he had been in the previous four years combined, probably shouldn’t hinge his hopes on many more fights like the one he posted yesterday.

After the jump, find the complete list of tour-level 0-6 comebacks since 2000.

Continue reading Bouncing Back From a Bagel

The Most Familiar Faces

In last week’s Basel final, Roger Federer and Juan Martin Del Potro faced off for the seventh time this year, and the 16th time overall. Seven times in one year is an awful lot, about 10% of Delpo’s matches. It’s even more remarkable because only two of those contests have been finals — in order to meet so many times, the draws of several tournaments had to complement their consistently strong play.

Making matters even more extreme is that there is a better-than-50% chance that Federer and Del Potro will meet in London next week, bringing the total to 8. And there’s a slim chance–if they are drawn in the same group, then play again in the final–that the sum will reach 9.

So, what’s the record? Seven is already pretty good, right?

Single year head-to-heads

In fact, as with so many other records, Federer is #1 in the last 30 years. He holds the record with Jo Wilfried Tsonga, against whom he played eight times last year. (In the entire professional era, the mark belongs to Ilie Nastase and Tom Gorman, who played at least nine times in 1972. I’ve excluded years before 1980 because a variety of factors caused the top players to meet much more frequently than they do these days.)

As long as Fed and Delpo are at seven, they will be tied with four other pairs: John McEnroe and Ivan Lendl in 1984, Jim Courier and Michael Chang in 1995, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal in 2007, and Novak/Rafa again in 2009. Another 11 pairs met six times in a single year, including Nadal and Djokovic in 2008 and 2011. (Along with, weirdly, Rajeev Ram and Donald Young in 2007. Must be the wild cards.)

All-time head-to-heads

Since Djokovic and Nadal show up at the top of the single-year list no more than four times, it stands to reason that they must be near the top of the all-time list, as well. Indeed, they are.

In fact, assuming Nadal returns to health in anywhere near his historical form, this current pair of stars will almost undoubtedly take over the all-time lead next year. They could hold it for a very long time.

Player 1       Player 2        H2Hs    W-L  
Ivan Lendl     John McEnroe      35  20-15  
Ivan Lendl     Jimmy Connors     34  22-12  
Pete Sampras   Andre Agassi      34  20-14  
John McEnroe   Jimmy Connors     34  20-14  
Rafael Nadal   Novak Djokovic    33  19-14  
Boris Becker   Stefan Edberg     32  22-10  
Roger Federer  Novak Djokovic    28  16-12  
Rafael Nadal   Roger Federer     28  18-10  
Stefan Edberg  Ivan Lendl        26  14-12  
Roger Federer  Lleyton Hewitt    26   18-8

This is one record that, for all of his dominance, Federer will probably never co-hold. To find yourself on this list, you not only need to rank among the all-time greats, you need a very-near-contemporary who ranks just as high.

(If you’re interested in head-to-head records, I hope you’re already using the Head-to-Head Matrix on TennisAbstract.com. It’s updated every week, and shows the career H2H records of every matchup within the current top 15. Each H2H record is linked directly to a listing of the relevant matches.)