Tennis, Unlike Baseball, Has No Set Way for Keeping Score | Hacker News Reader

Tennis, Unlike Baseball, Has No Set Way for Keeping Score

nytimes.com

25 pointssmacktoward13 comments

This isn't about keeping score, but about tracking detailed statistical information about every play. Tennis scoring is quite standardized, as any player will tell you.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis#Scoring

There's a standard for scoring, but not keeping score. There's no standardized notation for recording a game of tennis.

Recording a 4-6-3 double play isn't about keeping score either, it's about tracking detailed statistical information about every play. That's kind of the point of the article: baseball has standardized notation whereas tennis does not. It's as if different baseball stats trackers gave different field positions different numbers. One guy starts counting from left field, one guy starts at the catcher, one guy starts at the pitcher. Or maybe they use letters instead of numbers. Or maybe they use 2O for a double play (it's two outs, after all). Or STO for strike-outs.

That's the state that tennis is in, and that's the point of the article.

Starting in the 1980s, I used to score baseball games obsessively, taking great care to produce a beautiful and informative document. Somewhere along the line, with more and more information about the game becoming available in real time, it became clear that continuing to do so was pointless. The sad part is realizing that maybe it was already pointless before that.

It wasn't pointless.

I used to do the same thing when I was a kid with soccer and hockey games (growing up in Europe). It made me better at a lot of things that were useful to me in a career in technology - attention to detail, presentation skills, learning to extrapolate and summarize (i.e. I would try to see who scored more goals, or what time period were the most goals scored, etc).

As an outsider, baseball appears to be a very rigid game. (Not sure if rigid is the right word.) What I mean is that almost everything that can happen on the field is possible to keep track of statistically, that is, everything happens within a given set of actions (and usually in more-or-less distinct order).

This easily leads to agreement about what is important to keep track of. The example for baseball could be described in three lines of text.

The example for tennis, otoh, seem mostly to describe that there is little agreement on what is important (or on which level to keep notes). Some are happy to basically keep the score (the actual game score) by hand, while others describes details about each point (or even stroke).

It also seems like the big four American sports are much more obsessed with statistics than "European" sports, that might also have something to do with it.

I think that the existant baseball score-keeping leaves out some important information as well; it's not uncommon to see people extend the basic notation.

A fly-out to 4 is very different if there is a major defensive shift on, for example.

(Certain hitters favor hitting to one side of the field or another, and when they are particularly dominant hitters, the defense will move highly out-of-position; moving the defense from the standard position in general is called a "shift").

When we first learned about finite state machines in computer science, baseball came to mind.

It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to draw the state diagram for a baseball game just like you could with a regex.

What you say makes a good deal of sense to me. Baseball has a discrete start to each "play" when a pitch is thrown, football has its snap. In watching the World Cup, I can see that you have time of possession, touches, take-aways, assists, and so on, but I should still think less for the statistician to use.

I believe that the Dodgers' first statistician got his start in hockey.

there are many derivative uses of sports statistics, but i think the value of stats ultimately stems from (1) an athlete's desire to compete and excel and (2) an expression of the athlete's identity.

so what stats you take should be useful in one of those two contexts, e.g., how many aces, faults, breaks, etc. do you have? does that mean you have a power game or a finesse game?

the first order of tennis stats comes from the open vision system described in the article: where the players and the ball are on winning shots. higher order stats come from understanding strategy and tactics (e.g., how each shot placement affects the outcome of each point, each game, each set, etc.)

(i'm working on a system to capture real-time stats for amateur sports)

Beauty of a sport is in playing...and not so much in keeping score. When you are really playing(in the zone), you don't look up at the score.

When talking about keeping score, we are discussing spectators, not players.

Many could argue there is great beauty in the records of games played, the statistics, and the codified events of the day's action.

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