30-Love: A Little Website for Big Data

Since the start of the Open Era, tennis has persistently lagged behind other pro sports in the drive to create and manage a comprehensive, reliable and accessible database. That’s no longer true, thanks to the efforts of moonlighting baseball statistician Jeff Sackmann.

Responding to the fragmented and woeful state of stat-keeping in tennis, Sackmann created a website in 2011 that has become a go-to source for anyone interested in tennis statistics, Tennis Abstract.

The ongoing surge in the popularity of tennis is bringing new and often young fans to the game. They now have a place to quickly access, say, Novak Djokovic’s match results in the year 2014, the top 21-and-under players on either the WTA or ATP tours, head-to-head records of the current Top 15 stars on either tour, among countless bits of information.

I created it to scratch my own itch. Jeff Sackmann

Additionally, Sackmann is running TA’s Match Charting Project, a crowd-sourced effort to collect shot-by-shot stats of tour-level matches. Over 100 volunteers have logged thousands of matches that are accessible in that portion of the site.

It comes as no surprise that Sackmann is the tech half of a small firm that has provided stats to MLB teams since 2007. But he’s a tennis guy, so he launched TennisAbstract.com a decade ago as a labor of love.

“I created it to scratch my own itch,” he says. “I wanted to have a tennis encyclopedia at my fingertips to rival all the great resources that have been available to baseball fans for decades.

“I’ve been wrangling sports statistics, cleaning them up, and making them more accessible for a long time.”

Sackmann says he is “older than [Elena] Dementieva but younger than [Amelie] Mauresmo,” which puts him almost dead center at age of 40. That’s pretty young, but Tennis Abstract has an old-school look and feel.

It can be challenging to navigate for newcomers, but once you get accustomed to how it works, you may find it indispensable.