.]

Hello and welcome to episode 1477, effectively wild a baseball podcast from

Fangrass presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindbergh of the

Ringer and you are listening to episode three of our seven episode series on

the state of Sabermetrics in a dozen different non-baseball sports, which we

have dubbed the multi-sports Sabermetrics Exchange. If you missed the start of the

series, we've already talked about football, basketball, hockey, and cricket as

we bring on experts and talk about the past present and future of advanced

analysis in their respective sports. Today we are taking a break from team

sports to talk about two individual sports, both of which one might find at a

country club and both of which have undergone major evolution stemming from

equipment changes, golf and tennis. Tennis gets first serve and golf will

tee off second. To talk about tennis, we are bringing in a multi-sport star, two-way

player Jeff Sackman, who has a baseball background. Also, he is now the founder

of tennis abstract. He writes about tennis at the tennis abstract blog, heavy

topspin, and also hosts the tennis abstract podcast. And he started the match

charting project, which I'm sure we will talk about. But before all that, he

co-founded Collette Splits, which aggregates and analyzes college data and

provides it to teams. And he used to research and write regularly for the

heartball times. So Jeff, I guess I should ask where we lost you. Why did

baseball lose you to tennis? Well, when I founded college splits, it was really

sort of a crash course in college baseball. I had never really been in college

...