Final 2015 Melog tennis ratings

All right, let's try this again. Here are the Melog ratings for men's tennis in 2015. The changes from last time I posted the ratings (apart from six months' worth of tennis being played) are the inclusion of more Davis Cup data (World Group playoff, Group 1 and Group 1 playoff matches are now included), and a shift in the baseline from the player with the 75th-highest mELO rating (Dusan Lajovic) to the player whose rating is at the median of all service games played during the year (Ryan Harrison, whose mELO rating is 142nd-highest). If you want more detail about the ratings, you can get it here if you want the mathematical version, or here if you want them explained in (hopefully) simpler terms.

On to the numbers!

One of the benefits of a lower baseline is the ability to present a longer list without having it lapse into craziness, so here are the top 75, with ATP rankings presented for comparison purposes:

Rank	Player	Melog	ATP Rank	ATP Pts
1	Novak Djokovic	101.3	1	16585
2	Andy Murray	65.8	2	8945
3	Roger Federer	65.4	3	8265
4	Rafael Nadal	40.3	5	5230
5	Tomas Berdych	36.5	6	4620
6	David Ferrer	34.1	7	4305
7	Stanislas Wawrinka	32.6	4	6865
8	Kei Nishikori	31.5	8	4235
9	Richard Gasquet	25.6	9	2850
10	Milos Raonic	18.9	14	2170
11	Roberto Bautista Agut	18.6	25	1480
12	Kevin Anderson	18.2	12	2475
13	Jo Wilfried Tsonga	17.8	10	2635
14	John Isner	16.8	11	2495
15	Gilles Simon	16.4	15	2145
16	Philipp Kohlschreiber	15.8	34	1185
17	Gael Monfils	15.1	24	1485
18	Ivo Karlovic	14.2	23	1485
19	David Goffin	14.1	16	1880
20	Jack Sock	13.4	26	1465
21	Grigor Dimitrov	12.7	28	1360
22	Marin Cilic	12.0	13	2405
23	Bernard Tomic	11.3	18	1675
24	Nick Kyrgios	11.3	30	1260
25	Gilles Muller	11.1	38	1105
26	Guillermo Garcia Lopez	9.5	27	1430
27	Fernando Verdasco	9.3	49	900
28	Steve Johnson	9.0	32	1240
29	Jeremy Chardy	8.7	31	1255
30	Dominic Thiem	8.6	20	1600
31	Alexandr Dolgopolov	8.6	36	1135
32	Feliciano Lopez	8.2	17	1690
33	Hyeon Chung	8.0	51	817
34	Viktor Troicki	7.6	22	1487
35	Andreas Seppi	7.5	29	1360
36	Albert Ramos	7.4	54	798
37	Simone Bolelli	6.8	58	790
38	Leonardo Mayer	6.7	35	1150
39	Fabio Fognini	6.6	21	1515
40	Pablo Cuevas	6.4	40	1065
41	Marcos Baghdatis	6.0	46	933
42	Joao Sousa	5.6	33	1191
43	Sam Querrey	5.5	59	785
44	Vasek Pospisil	5.2	39	1075
45	Juan Monaco	5.2	53	810
46	Thomaz Bellucci	5.2	37	1105
47	Benoit Paire	5.2	19	1633
48	Jiri Vesely	4.8	41	1057
49	Teymuraz Gabashvili	4.7	50	863
50	Aljaz Bedene	4.6	45	939
51	Adrian Mannarino	4.4	47	930
52	Ivan Dodig	4.3	87	636
53	Denis Istomin	4.1	61	781
54	Nicolas Almagro	4.1	73	694
55	Yen Hsun Lu	4.0	77	674
56	Federico Delbonis	3.9	52	815
57	Pablo Andujar	3.8	64	770
58	Guido Pella	3.6	74	693
59	Lukas Rosol	3.5	55	797
60	Samuel Groth	3.4	60	782
61	Borna Coric	3.4	44	941
62	Sergiy Stakhovsky	3.3	62	780
63	Jerzy Janowicz	3.3	57	795
64	Donald Young	3.2	48	907
65	John Millman	3.2	92	611
66	Tommy Robredo	3.1	42	1000
67	Mikhail Kukushkin	3.1	65	762
68	Pablo Carreno Busta	3.0	67	734
69	Thanasi Kokkinakis	3.0	80	656
70	Thiemo De Bakker	3.0	99	587
71	Carlos Berlocq	2.9	112	530
72	Taylor Harry Fritz	2.9	177	290
73	Daniel Munoz de la Nava	2.8	75	681
74	Robin Haase	2.7	66	740
75	Paolo Lorenzi	2.7	68	725

So the rankings are very similar to the ATP's, but there are also a few noteworthy differences - and they start pretty close to the top, with the ATP putting Wawrinka in fourth (thanks to his French Open title) and my numbers placing him three spots lower (thanks to his usual inconsistency throughout the year).

Also noteworthy among my top 20 are Roberto Bautista Agut and Philipp Kohlschreiber, The reason for their difference in position is pretty simple - they spent all year getting drawn against the top three players. Kohlschreiber, in particular, faced Djokovic, Federer, or Murray on seven occasions; he lost all of them, but won a set in each of the five best-of-three matches he played against the group. Bautista Agut's draws were of similar difficulty, and he largely fared less well against the top players - with the notable exception of a brilliant fourth-round match against Djokovic at the US Open, in which he split the first two sets with the world's best player and made him work very hard to take the match in four.

Further down the list, the biggest jump in comparison to the ATP rankings is American teenager Taylor Harry Fritz, who played only eight professional events this year, but won two Challenger titles and made the final in a third, while also securing his first ATP World Tour victory as a wild card in a pre-Wimbledon grass event. Given that he also won the Junior US Open and made the final at the Junior French Open and the semis at Junior Wimbledon... it would be safe to say that he probably has a bright future ahead of him.

On the other side of things, there are seven members of the ATP's top 75 who don't qualify for Melog's. The highest-ranked of those is Martin Klizan, who the ATP puts at #43; Melog has him at #77. But the biggest difference comes in the person of Victor Estrella Burgos, the ATP's #56; Melog, which is not nearly as impressed with his title in one of the weaker 250-point fields of the year, places him all the way down at #150.

At some point, I may set up a few pairs of players to monitor over the course of the year, just to see how the ones my system prefers do in comparison to the ATP's preferences. But that's probably something to be done in another post. For now, I'll just let the numbers speak for themselves as we get ready for the beginning of the 2016 season.