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.

2011 Year in Review

To establish the context for the 2011 rankings, here is a narrative summary of the year in (men’s singles) tennis in 2011. (In hindsight, it would have made more sense to do this post before putting up the rankings. Live and learn.)

2011 Tennis Rankings: 10-1

Just as a refresher before we get back into it, the rankings from 20 up to 11 were:

Feliciano Lopez (5.0)

Gael Monfils (5.3)

John Isner (5.9)

Nicolas Almagro (6.0)

Fernando Verdasco (6.5)

Andy Roddick (7.9)

Gilles Simon (8.0)

Marin Cilic (9.2)

Richard Gasquet (9.4)

Robin Soderling (12.6)

And now, onward and (very far) upward!

2011 Tennis Rankings: Numbers 20 through 11

In the post that completed the introduction of my ranking method for tennis players, I used Stanislas Wawrinka’s 2011 season as the example for the calculations. I did this for three reasons. First, he’s in the news these days, having just won the 2014 Australian Open. Second, he’s currently my favorite player, a position he worked himself into over the course of last season (a fact which made the aforementioned Australian Open gloriously enjoyable).

And third, he comes in 21^st in my 2011 rankings, thereby making him a natural jumping off point for the top 20 players of the year. If you’ll recall, the rankings are presented as the base 10 logarithm of the ratio between the odds of the player in question out-performing the #75 player in the world against the actual draw faced by the player in question, and the odds of the #75 player in the world exceeding the player in question. Wawrinka’s score was 5.0, meaning that this ratio in his case was roughly 100,000 to 1.

Before we get started, a note on the information presented alongside the rankings: Match, set, and service game records are taken from my own database, and may differ from those reported on the ATP website in some cases. I’m including wins and losses in Challenger events, which the ATP doesn't (not that top-20 players generally participate in many of those anyway), and I'm also ignoring what are called dead rubbers in Davis Cup play (matches played after the best-of-five team matchup is already clinched), which the ATP counts.

On to the good stuff (or at least the good stuff precursor) - the second 10 of the 2011 rankings.

Ranking tennis players: Method (Part 3)

The previous two posts have laid out the framework for evaluating tennis players in terms of performance when on the court. All that remains is to take the when-on-court ratings and turn them into an evaluation of an entire season.