

Tennis, Unlike Baseball, Has No Set Way for Keeping Score - smacktoward
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/sports/tennis/tennis-unlike-baseball-has-no-set-way-for-keeping-score.html?_r=1&emc=rss&partner=rss

======
dublinben
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis#Scoring)

~~~
sp332
There's a standard for scoring, but not _keeping_ score. There's no
standardized notation for recording a game of tennis.

------
dfan
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.

~~~
zavulon
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).

------
eCa
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.

~~~
aidenn0
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").

------
clairity
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)

------
sunjain
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.

~~~
aidenn0
When talking about keeping score, we are discussing spectators, not players.

