Melog Rankings: Post-French Open 2015

And we're back. Apologies for the interruption; it turns out that the difficulty of compiling tennis rankings based on inordinately large spreadsheets increases exponentially when somebody steals your computer. But the computer has now been replaced, the spreadsheets re-accessed (thanks to the cloud-based version of Office), and we're up and running again.

So... did anything interesting happen while I was out of action?


Here's the updated table of the top 50:

Rank	Player	Melog	Rank change	Melog change
1	Novak Djokovic	61.4	0	0.7
2	Roger Federer	38.6	0	4.4
3	Andy Murray	33.0	0	7.7
4	Kei Nishikori	22.7	1	2.0
5	David Ferrer	20.2	1	1.6
6	Tomas Berdych	17.3	1	-0.8
7	Stan Wawrinka	17.1	4	7.3
8	Rafael Nadal	14.4	-4	-10.1
9	Milos Raonic	13.6	-1	-3.4
10	Gael Monfils	10.4	0	-0.2
11	David Goffin	10.3	1	1.0
12	Grigor Dimitrov	9.3	-3	-1.7
13	Jo-Wilfried Tsonga	9.1	1	2.4
14	Richard Gasquet	6.6	5	1.8
15	Marin Cilic	6.5	-2	-0.7
16	Roberto Bautista Agut	6.3	-1	0.4
17	Tommy Robredo	5.2	1	0.1
18	Gilles Simon	5.1	-2	-0.7
19	Kevin Anderson	5.1	-2	-0.5
20	Jack Sock	5.0	0	0.7
21	Sam Querrey	4.8	0	0.6
22	John Isner	4.2	1	0.5
23	Philipp Kohlschreiber	3.9	-1	0.1
24	Pablo Cuevas	3.1	12	0.9
25	Leonardo Mayer	3.0	8	0.5
26	Adrian Mannarino	2.9	1	0.0
27	Nick Kyrgios	2.8	5	0.3
28	Fernando Verdasco	2.7	3	0.2
29	Juan Monaco	2.7	5	0.3
30	Alexandr Dolgopolov	2.6	5	0.3
31	Viktor Troicki	2.5	-6	-0.6
32	Bernard Tomic	2.5	-8	-0.7
33	Jeremy Chardy	2.5	-3	-0.1
34	Andreas Seppi	2.2	-8	-0.7
35	Simone Bolelli	2.1	8	0.4
36	Feliciano Lopez	2.1	4	0.1
37	Ivo Karlovic	1.9	-9	-0.6
38	Vasek Pospisil	1.8	10	0.5
39	Julien Benneteau	1.5	5	-0.2
40	Guillermo Garcia-Lopez	1.4	20	0.8
41	Dominic Thiem	1.4	12	0.3
42	Gilles Muller	1.3	-13	-1.2
43	Pablo Andujar	1.3	41	1.4
44	Nicolas Almagro	1.3	-3	-0.4
45	Sergiy Stakhovsky	1.3	6	0.2
46	Steve Darcis	1.2	-8	-0.8
47	Diego Schwartzman	1.1	9	0.3
48	Marcos Baghdatis	1.1	-12	-1.0
49	Ivan Dodig	1.0	-5	-0.6
50	John Millman	1.0	16	0.7

The big story of the French Open was, of course, Stan Wawrinka upsetting Novak Djokovic in the final and securing his second-ever Grand Slam title. In the process, he cut short Novak's renewed run at a career Grand Slam. He also became the first player in over a decade to win a Grand Slam one year after losing his first match at the same event.

I would focus more heavily on this (especially because Wawrinka is my favorite player), but doing so would undercut the two main developments that occurred during clay season before Sunday. The first is the emergence of Andy Murray as a top-tier clay force. Just over a month ago, he'd never made a tour-level final on the surface; he now has two titles, one of which was a Masters event that featured wins over Nishikori and Nadal. Frankly, it never made sense to me that Murray wasn't an effective player on clay, as his style (great speed and agility, solid groundstrokes from both sides, more comfortable on defense than offense) would seem to lend itself to the dirt. Now that he finally has his feet under him on the surface, he can be considered a legitimate threat at every event he plays, and his leap upward in Melog rating reflects that.

On the other side, this clay season also provided further confirmation of the increasing mortality of Rafael Nadal. Had almost anyone else achieved Nadal's recent results on clay, it would be considered a good stretch; the three Masters and one Slam went semi, final, quarter, quarter, and all of his losses were to players who ended clay season in the top 4 of the ATP rankings. But "one of the better players in the world" is a noteworthy step down from Nadal's accustomed unassailability on his favorite surface, and one from which it may prove difficult for him to rebound.

Further down the rankings, there was a whole lot of movement, which is what happens when you don't update for a month and a half. Australian Nick Kyrgios has joined the top 30, and is joined in his climb by several other players who had fine clay campaigns (Cuevas, Mayer, Andujar, Thiem, and Garcia-Lopez are fairly unsurprising names on that list). The recent stretch of tennis was much less friendly to Tomic, Karlovic, and Muller, none of whose games are especially dirt-happy.

Much, much further down the rankings, you find Ernests Gulbis, whose failure to defend his 2014 title in Nice or semi at the French Open led to the completion of his exodus from both my top 50 and the ATP's. This would be an opportunity to trumpet my rankings, which had Gulbis slide much faster than the conventional ones, except that I'm not sure how impressive it is to observe that someone who had won two matches in the year's first four and a half months was unlikely to produce sustained success in the immediate future.

One caveat to this week's rankings before signing off - the Melog system actually places Javier Marti at the #43 spot. Marti has played just one event that counts for these ratings in the last 12 months, making the final at the Casablanca Challenger in January. Outside of that, he's spent his time at the Futures level and played respectably. Still, he has less than 100 games' worth of tennis in the dataset I'm using, and until he plays another Challenger, I'm holding him out of the top 50. (His ATP ranking has climbed enough that it may not be long before he's competing in Challengers.)

Up next, it's the newly-extended-but-still-brief grass season (now with three weeks leading up to Wimbledon instead of two!) We'll be back around the end of this month to see how the top 50 looks heading into tennis's most prestigious event. However, we'll also be back sooner than that to look at how the ratings have changed over the (roughly) half a season we've had so far.