The Past is Gone

My two best high school buddies, Steve and Jeff, came to visit me in Champaign last week. It was the first time in my adult life that I'd had two visitors (with wives and children in tow) at my place at the same time. Despite the presence of (rationally indifferent) women and children, Steve and Jeff and I went through our usual routine of playing as many competitive sports as possible, in what little time we had together. In between bouts of whiffle ball, disc golf and mini-golf, we played tennis, which all three of us had played competitively at John Hersey High school, back in the day.

Before we went out to play together in Hessel Park--as out-of-shape 33 year-old men--I pulled an old white tennis ball out of my upstairs closet and asked Jeff and Steve if they remembered it. Neither of them did, so I told them the story of how I had seen that ball one day between the fence of the tennis courts and the stands of the football stadium at Hersey High, circa April, 1992. Back then, it reminded me of the white balls I used to play with in my backyard as a child, and I apparently got excited about it enough to capture their imagination. Unbeknownst to me, they went back out to the courts after practice and retrieved the thing from its ignominious resting place. They then wrapped it up and gave it to me as a present for my 18th birthday.

By the time we started hitting around in the park, it became pretty obvious that the old white ball was as dead as a doornail. It still served its purposes, though, as a changeup in our rotational game of 1-on-2 tennis. After about an forty minutes of play, though, I looked up and discovered that the old white ball was nowhere to be seen. I asked Steve if he knew where it was, and he just shrugged his shoulders and said he didn't know.

And so ended the story of the old white tennis ball in my life.

They used to use white tennis balls at Wimbledon, when I was growing up. I thought about that as I watched the men's final last Sunday morning, a day after Steve and Jeff and their families left Champaign. It was Federer vs. Nadal in a match for the ages-maybe the best men's final since the epic Borg vs. McEnroe tilt, in 1980.

I don't have many memories of that 1980 match, but I've seen replays of it, time and again, in the 27 years that have passed between then and now. One of the remarkable features of it is the glow of the afternoon light that permeates the final points of the later sets between old Bjorg and John--you don't normally see that kind of light when you wake up at 8 am to watch breakfast at Wimbledon. It's too early (2 o'clock, London time) for the shadows to be that long when play begins. I often played in that kind of light when I was a kid, though--hammering white balls with my wooden racket against the back of my family's garage, taking the balls low off the wounded turf of my backyard until darkness put an end to yet another Minnesota's summer day.
It was there that the tennis champions of the past became the scaffolding of sports legend in my mind.

The Federer-Nadal donnybrook that went down on Sunday morning was almost good enough to live up to those childhood fantasies of mine. And it almost lasted long enough to bring the same lighting scheme back to my TV. One final thing it did--which I also hadn't seen in more than 25 years--was give the world a five-time consecutive Wimbledon men's champion, in the form of Roger Federer. And I can distinctly remember a world in which Bjorn Borg was a reigning, five-time world champion at Wimbledon. He played McEnroe again, on a Sunday morning in July, 1981, for a sixth straight title. I got up early to watch it and remember NBC putting on a picture of William Renshaw--the Englishman who had won 6 straight titles from 1881-1886, during the old challenge round system--and asking whether Borg could finally repeat Renshaw's feat. I was able to see the first set of the rematch before my Dad carted us all off to church, despite my protestations. Dad then compounded his sins that morning by boldly stating that he'd be cheering for McEnroe, simply because he was an American. In the name of all that was dignified and good, the rest of us were cheering for Borg. But he lost. And no one's had a chance at a sixth straight title again until now.

They carted Borg, McEnroe and Jimmy Connors out--in their current form--for the final on Sunday at the All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet club. I hadn't seen Borg in years, but he had clearly become a middle-aged shadow of his former self. It was an odd thing to see in a man who had cut his career short about five years too early. There was no doubting now that he could never go back to make up to the world what he had taken away from us too soon.

....

Anyhow. The updates to the site keep coming, even though I am no longer working on the database at the same, feverish pace that I was back in June. Most importantly, I now have a working link for stat leader pages posted to the main page. You should check it out some time. It'll give you the leaders from 1957-2007 in any statistical category you like, for any league or team that you might be interested in. Literally hours of idle fun.

I have also been working alternately on the databases for playoff years before 2003, and the 1999 regular season. Retrosheet has not posted event files for either of those sets of data (though they keep claiming that they're going to do so soon), so I have to reconstruct the play-by-play data on my own. Retrosheet *does* have the play-by-play accounts of all playoff (and all-star) games on their site in a modified form, and I'm pretty close to writing a translation script to deal with all that.

The 1999 data is presenting a more formidable challenge, on the other hand. I actually downloaded all the play-by-play game logs (and box scores) for that season from the espn.com website eight years ago. Or so I thought. It turns out that I actually neglected to download any of the Devil Rays' home games for that year. Don't ask me why, but--like the white tennis ball and Bjorn Borg's forehand--those games are now gone. I still have the info for the other 2,349 games played that year, though. However, espn.com's system for posting that data wasn't as good eight years ago as it is now, so a lot of the play-by-play logs are simply missing several innings of information. Remarkably, I've discovered over the past couple of weeks that, given a modern box score and the play-by-play info for the first six innings of a game, it is possible to reconstruct what happened in innings 7 through 9 in almost every game. Each game can actually be turned into a puzzle which is more or less as much fun as a sudoku.

Unfortunately, those puzzles are also really time consuming. I think there are about sixteen days' worth of games that are in that format, and it takes about a day's worth of work to process any one of those days. So. Unless one of you out there might be willing to help fill in the statistical gaps for me, I can pretty much guarantee that the 1999 data won't be posted to this site any time sooner than four months from now.

And I also have aspirations of finally posting some career stat data, once that's done. But in the meantime, you should go check out those leaders pages. They're so much fun.

Until next time,
Steve