from Amazon
Monday, February 26, 2007
Leverage Index for Tennis
Phil keeps unearthing the most fascinating studies on his blog, and the most recent is on tennis. The researcher of that paper even creates a Leverage Index for tennis, using the same process I detailed for baseball (though he doesn’t actually present the index itself). Extremely fascinating study.
I see no reason for the author to extend his thoughts to beyond tennis. He noted as much, yet I can’t think why he would even bring up anything beyond sports to begin with. As Phil notes, women have certain physical traits that they leverage in tennis. In the business world, it’s about leveraging other traits.
The interesting tidbit is that how in tennis the “average swing value”, for each point, is around .025 wins. In baseball, the average swing value for each PA is around .035 wins. So, if you miss a random score (point) in tennis, you’ll have missed less than if you miss a random PA in baseball. Of course, that is based on the quality of the players in the sample. If you restricted the tennis players to the top 32 or top 16, it wouldn’t work out the same. And the number of sets for women and men also play a role.
I wonder what the expected total win- and loss-shares is in tennis compared to baseball. I’m totally making these numbers up, but my guess is that there are more total shares in a tennis match versus a ballgame:
Baseball: 80 PAs * .35 shares/PA = 2.8 shares per game
Tennis: 150 points * .25 shares/points = 3.5 shares per match