Grand Per-Slam Scores

We’ve spent some time now on Grand Slam Scores as a method for evaluating tennis players. We’ve used two different weighting methods, and broken the scores down Slam by Slam. But everything we’ve looked at so far has been a career total, and that is inevitably only part of the story.

So let’s move on to the other basic mode of evaluation: rate statistics. We’ll start with the top players in overall Grand Slam Score accumulated per Slam played:

Melog Rankings: Mid-February 2015

February is not a month in which tennis gets a huge amount of attention from the American sports media. Not only are there no Grand Slams played, there are also no Masters events - and this February, the Davis Cup is also absent.

There are, however, more ATP World Tour events held in February than in any other month on the calendar. And with half of those tournaments now complete, including the first 500-point event of the year in Rotterdam, let's see where we stand on Melog's top 50 players.

Grand Slam-by-Slam Scores

We’ve already looked at two versions of Grand Slam Scores and seen how they treat the career totals of a variety of players. Now, it’s time to start breaking the scores down into their components. We’ll start out the obvious way: by looking at scores achieved in each individual Slam. As mentioned in previous posts on the subject, these breakdowns will be done through the lens of the odds-based scoring method, rather than the world rankings-based method.

Melog rankings: Post-Australian Open 2015

So the men's Australian Open final was played yesterday. Given that Novak Djokovic won his fifth title at the event, an Open Era record, and cemented his current stranglehold on the #1 ranking in the process, it was probably the biggest sports story of the day, right?

Okay, maybe not. But it's still a pretty big deal, tennis-wise. So let's see what the Melog ratings think of the changes from last year's Australian to this year's.

Grand Slam Scores 2: The other weighting option

We’ve previously introduced Grand Slam scores as a simple-yet-effective method for evaluating players through tennis history through a lens that conventional wisdom can understand. The initial method used was to award 1 point for a title, and split that in half for each round further from the title that the player was eliminated. While that’s a mathematically satisfying way of handling things, there’s no reason to insist on it as the only possibility. And as it happens, there’s a readily-available alternative, one that’s already in use in a well-known venue.

Melog rankings: Pre-Australian Open 2015

As promised, I'm going to try doing biweekly (or thereabouts) updates to my tennis rankings this year. The rankings will contain the last year's worth of tennis from Grand Slams, the ATP and Challenger tours, and the Davis Cup World Group.

Due to slight changes in the ATP schedule this year as compared to last, there may occasionally be oddities in what I classify as the last year's worth of tennis - it may not always match the ATP's interpretation precisely, and I will try to point out such differences when they arise. This week's rankings cover exactly the same tennis as the ATP's, as they include everything from last year's Australian Open to the tournaments that were just completed on Saturday.

Evaluating tennis history: Grand Slam Scores

One of the subjects I plan to explore regularly in this space is tennis history. It's a subject I've explored to some extent already, generally through the context of my Melog ratings. While I think the Melog system does a creditable job evaluating tennis performance, it is not without issues.

One of those issues is that the system does not match the evaluation of tennis players in popular opinion. I often find this to be an asset; Melog places value on excelling throughout the year, not merely in big tournaments. But it is inescapably true that most evaluators, including the players themselves, put far more emphasis on Grand Slams than they do on anything else; in fact, “career Grand Slams won,” which obviously ignores achievement in other events, is a commonly-used proxy for all-time ranking.

There is another problem with the Melog system that troubles me far more: It requires a great deal of time to compile the necessary data to evaluate even a single year of tennis. And rewarding as I find that process, it still means that I’ve only got the numbers for 2008-14 so far, which leaves me without a ready means of comparing Roger Federer to Pete Sampras and Bjorn Borg. That would be a nice capability to have.

As it happens, I’ve developed a method that addresses both of those problems at once: it is based entirely on Grand Slam performance, and it is readily calculable for anyone who’s played in the Open Era. And given the content of these introductory paragraphs, you’ve probably figured out that I’m presenting that method here.