THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

In previous Book discussions about home field advantage, didn’t people conclude that the more “events” in a game, the more opportunities HFA has to take effect?  Like basketball, tennis is a sport where the better team/player wins quite often, because there are some many points played.  Federer may only win 52% of the points he plays, but over three or five sets, that gives him a 90%+ chance of winning the match.  With so many points, I’m not surprised that home field advantage in tennis is huge.  Although the degree Jeff shows is more like HUUUUUUUUGE.

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A final thought.  As I’ve mentioned in just about all of my posts on tennis, surface is not considered in any of my analysis.  That’s a function of the ATP rankings, which also do not consider surface.
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As I read through the first couple of paragraphs the thought that came into my mind was the playing surface.  Americans in general grow up playing on hardcourts and Europeans and S.Americans on clay.  I think this must be controlled for.  The author did briefly touch on this subject but did not offer any sound analysis on it.  It would be interesting if he took this one step further and nuetralized for surface.  Interesting subject though, as I am a ravid tennis player.

One last thing is that many foriegn tennis players do not live in their “home” country.  Many live in Florida and Monte Carlo.

So instead I might look at NCAA tennis matches as they are usually played on a very similar surface (yes, I know not all hardcourts are the same).