{"id":353,"date":"2011-05-29T00:06:08","date_gmt":"2011-05-29T00:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heavytopspin.com\/?p=353"},"modified":"2011-05-29T00:06:08","modified_gmt":"2011-05-29T00:06:08","slug":"the-french-opens-new-balls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/29\/the-french-opens-new-balls\/","title":{"rendered":"The French Open&#8217;s New Balls"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/settesei\/2016\/10\/01\/le-nuove-palline-del-roland-garros\/\">Italian translation at settesei.it<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p>Much has been made over the new balls at Roland Garros this year&#8211;players have complained that they are lighter, heavier, that they bounce differently. \u00a0As far as bounce and spin is concerned, there isn&#8217;t much we can glean from the available data. \u00a0But we can take a broad look at server dominance to get a sense of how the French is playing this year.<\/p>\n<p>Several months ago, I <a href=\"http:\/\/summerofjeff.wordpress.com\/2010\/12\/08\/server-dominance-by-surface\/\">looked<\/a> at most of the ATP-level matches from 2010, and determined that the server wins points on different surfaces at the following rates:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Clay: 61.5%<\/li>\n<li>Hard: 63.7%<\/li>\n<li>Grass: 65.9%<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The gaps between those numbers may not look very big, but they represent a major indicator in the differences between surfaces. \u00a0If the gap between clay and hard is 2.2%, then 2.2% must be a pretty big deal!<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve also determined the following regarding ace rates&#8211;again, using 2010 data. \u00a0&#8220;Ace rate&#8221; is simply the percentage of serves that are aces:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Clay: 5.5%<\/li>\n<li>Hard: 8.5%<\/li>\n<li>Grass: 10.5%<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now <em>that&#8217;s <\/em>a big difference.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Roland Garros<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>What about the French? \u00a0Taking the 2010 event as a whole, players won 62.4% of service points, and served aces 6.6% of the time. \u00a0Thus, I think it&#8217;s reasonable to conclude that the courts at RG last year played faster than most other clay-court ATP events. \u00a0Weather and&#8211;you guessed it&#8211;other equipment, such as balls, can also make a difference.<\/p>\n<p>This year, 112 of the 127 men&#8217;s matches have already been played, including over 17,000 points, so I think it&#8217;s safe to start drawing conclusions. \u00a0This year, servers are only winning 62.0% of points&#8211;roughly halfway between the clay-court average and the results from last year&#8217;s &#8220;fast&#8221; RG. \u00a0More dramatically, players are only scoring aces on 5.6% of points, well below last year&#8217;s figure at the French.<\/p>\n<p>I can&#8217;t shed any light on the specific quirks shown by the new balls, but for whatever reason, the French is playing <em>more<\/em>\u00a0like an average clay-court event than it did last year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Italian translation at settesei.it Much has been made over the new balls at Roland Garros this year&#8211;players have complained that they are lighter, heavier, that they bounce differently. \u00a0As far as bounce and spin is concerned, there isn&#8217;t much we can glean from the available data. \u00a0But we can take a broad look at server &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/29\/the-french-opens-new-balls\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The French Open&#8217;s New Balls<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-french-open","category-research"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}