MONEYBALL HAS NOT YET COME TO TENNIS.

MONEYBALL HAS NOT YET COME TO TENNIS. I have posted from time to time on the increased use of statistics in baseball (as in MONEYBALL), basketball, football and soccer. This article in the Wall Street Journal by Tom Perrotta argues that scouting has not yet come to tennis—much less statistics. It asserts that players content themselves with broad generalities about their opponents. There is little or no film study of opponents so that there are no statistics on tendencies or spray charts of where players choose to return a ball in different situations or analysis of sequences of shots that opponents make or study of possible “tells” when a player is taking a shot. The people who testify in the article to the general lack of scouting are coaches who believe in scouting, including Ivan Lendl. Perrotta gives an example of a typical attitude: If I play well, I’ll win; if I play badly, I’ll lose.