Upsetopsy: Garcia-Lopez over Nadal

It was September of 2010, and Rafael Nadal was on top of the tennis world. Earlier in the month, he had won the US Open, thereby completing the career Grand Slam, extending his streak of consecutive Slams won to three, and further securing the top spot in the world rankings. The next event Nadal played was a small tournament in Bangkok; he had a first-round bye and then won his next two matches with ease (dropping 5 total service games in each one).

His semifinal opponent was fellow Spaniard Guillermo Garcia-Lopez. He entered the tournament with an ATP ranking of 53 and a respectable 21-19 record on the year, having lost in the first or second round of all four Slams and with a solitary final in Eastbourne to his name. The three wins that put him in the semis were all hard-fought, with scores of 6-4, 7-6; 7-5, 6-7, 7-5; and 7-6, 4-6, 6-3. And while all three came against top-75 opposition, none of them approached the level of the world’s best player, one who had bested Garcia-Lopez with ease in their two previous encounters.

Rafa vs. Rafa

Rafael Nadal won three Grand Slams in 2010. Novak Djokovic won three Grand Slams in 2011. That most basic method of tennis accounting would hold those two years to be equal, but it’s not difficult to see why Melog 75 rates Djokovic's season higher; the Serb simply performed better in the other events.

It is significantly more surprising, however, that Melog also holds Nadal’s own 2011 season, in which he won three tournaments and one Slam, to be better than his 2010, in which he captured seven total titles including the aforementioned three majors. 2011 is generally considered to have been a step back for Nadal, with Djokovic seizing his place at the top of the heap.

So what is Melog thinking? There is a short answer for this, and a long one. Let’s use the long one.

2010 Tennis Rankings: The top 10

With the last post having been the listing of the second ten from the 2010 tennis season, one might assume that the next one would be the top 10... and one would be right.

2010 Tennis Rankings: Numbers 20 through 11

Before we get to the good stuff, a side note: It seems beneficial to have a name for my ranking system, in order to keep from having to refer to it simply as “my ranking system,” which is both clunky and overbearing. So here’s what I’m using at the moment; the name is of course subject to potential future modification.

The rating system is based on an Elo model, but one that’s multiplicative rather than additive. So let’s call that Melo (for multiplicative Elo, or modified Elo, or whatever other applicable M-word you can think of). The Melo ratings are then turned into full-year performance measures by comparing the player’s performance to what would be expected of the #75-rated player and taking the logarithm of the odds of #75 exceeding him. If you combine Melo and logarithm, you come out with Melog. And since we’re using #75 as the basis for comparison (which may not always remain the case), we’ll use Melog 75 as the name for the system.

With that out of the way, here are the second 10 of the Melog 75 rankings for men’s tennis in 2010.

2010 Year in Review

The next year for which I’ll be posting my tennis rankings is 2010. In order to set the stage for those rankings, here is the narrative description of the 2010 season.