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.

Melog Rankings: Post-Miami 2015

Last time, we saw that this year's edition of the Indian Wells Masters event created only minor disturbances in the rankings, mostly because the outcome of the final was the same as it had been last year - Novak Djokovic over Roger Federer.

The fortnight since then brought the playing of another Masters event, this one in Miami. And while Djokovic defended this title as well (sweeping Indian Wells and Miami for the third time in his career), his victory in the final this year was over Andy Murray rather than Rafael Nadal. Let's see if that created a bit more movement.

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.)

Using Slam Scores: Overrated and Underrated

I've expended quite a bit of virtual ink in this space discussing Grand Slam Scores, which evaluate historical performance in Slams as a way of comparing tennis players. But any player evaluation method worth its salt should be able to do more than just supply an answer to "which guy is better?" questions. Are Grand Slam Scores up to that task?

Let's find out. We'll start by applying them to the question of which tennis players are the most likely to be overrated and underrated in conventional opinion.

Melog Rankings: Post-Indian Wells 2015

It's been three weeks since our last checkup on the world's best tennis players - and in those three weeks, only one tournament was played on the ATP World Tour. This is actually a good sign as far as the interest level of the tennis that's been played: the tournament was the 96-man Indian Wells Masters event, one of the most important events on the calendar, and the extra week was taken up by the (very exciting) first round of Davis Cup play for 2015. Here's where we stand with those matches in the books:

Grand No-Slam Scores

We’ve spent a significant amount of time and virtual ink exploring Grand Slam Scores as a method for historical evaluation of tennis players – and so far, a significant portion of the findings that have resulted can be summed up by saying, “Roger Federer is really, really good.” While that is, of course, a perfectly valid conclusion to draw (and reinforce many times over), it is also not one that requires the development of new metrics to discover. So let’s expand our horizons beyond the Nadals, Samprases, Lendls, and Borgs of the tennis landscape, and use Slam Scores to evaluate some of the lesser lights of tennis history.

Melog Rankings: Post-February 2015

We've come to the conclusion of the month on the tennis calendar that has the biggest disparity between activity and attention. There were 12 total events in February, and every player in the top 10 participated in at least one; if you leave out Djokovic and Federer, the rest of the top 10 all played two or more.

So let's see where our top 50 stand as the tennis world braces for a return to... maybe not the spotlight, but at least a bit of increased newsworthiness.