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!

Tennis rankings like Thing Explainer would write about them

If you have read my writing before, you know that I like to write about games that people play, especially games that other people pay them to play. I also like to use numbers to talk about these games. Sometimes I use numbers that other people made up, but sometimes nobody else has made up numbers that can help me find out the things I want to know about the games I am writing about, so I make up my own numbers. I have a lot of fun seeing what my numbers say about the games I am watching, but the numbers can sometimes be hard for other people to understand.

So I am trying a new thing right now, using an idea from a man who used to help our country build boats that fly into space, and now makes funny drawings that people look at on their computers. He decided to draw a picture of an important space boat and write about what all of the parts do, but in words that most people can understand. He decided to use only the ten hundred words used most often in the language we use in my country. The drawing he made helped people learn about the space boat, and it was also very funny. The people who saw the drawing liked it so much that he decided to make a whole book of pictures of hard-to-understand things that were explained in simple words. (It is called Thing Explainer and it is a very good book.)

This man also made a place that helps other people write using the same words that he did. That is what I am doing now. I am going to explain some of the numbers I have made up using only the ten hundred words people use the most in this language.

2015 MLB Postseason: The statistical view

With baseball season having wrapped up, it's time to return to one of my favorite topics: postseason statistics, We'll look at the MVPs and LVPs in both pitching and hitting, then introduce a series that will carry me through the rest of this year.

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?

Game of the Fortnight (4/20/15)

In terms of producing exciting contests, the 2015 baseball season is off to a fine start. April 12 produced both a 14-inning affair between the Astros and Rangers and an 11-inning showdown between St. Louis and Cincinnati in which there were three lead changes, and the Reds left the go-ahead or winning run in scoring position for three straight innings before the Cardinals finished them off. Both of those were exceeded by Arizona and San Francisco's 12-inning battle on April 16, in which the Giants rallied to tie in both the ninth and tenth, gave up two in the twelfth, then got one of them back only to leave the tying run on second.

But all of those options were merely vying for second place behind Red Sox 6, Yankees 5 (19).

Game of Opening Day 2015

Dodgers 6, Padres 3. As you'd expect on Opening Day, both teams sent their aces, which meant Clayton Kershaw took on James Shields.

2015 Baseball Preview

The 2015 baseball season gets underway on Sunday, which means I'd better get the obligatory prediction post out of the way. Please keep in mind when reading this post that I picked the Padres to win the NL West last year, and that my Cy Young choices may in fact be cursed - not only have I never picked a winner correctly, but my guesses tend to have horrible years. (Last year, Clay Buchholz had an ERA over 5, and Michael Wacha barely cleared 100 innings.)