The Current Top 20 at the mid-point

[El Dude]

In talking about the Alcaraz-Sinner rivarly, I was curious about how their record compared, tournament by tournament over the last year and a half. This inquiry got out of hand and, well, you can see the result.

Explanation: You can anchor your viewing by looking at the three columns bordered by gray and black, which represent rankings - the one to the left by their names is 2022, the one in the middle is 2023, and one to the right is their current ranking, as of Monday, June 24 -- after Halle/London, but before the final Wimbledon warm-up ATP 250 (Eastbourne or Mallorca). The colors should be self-explanatory and follow the basically coding used on Wikipedia and Ultimate Tennis Statistics, except that I've differentiated R128, R64, R32, and R16 for big titles (but not for ATP 500s and 250s).

I've also added little touches - like gray separators for early season, clay season, grass season, and the late season.

I've also included Rafa for visual reference - so you can see how little he's played over this span of time.

I highly recommend clicking on the image to make it larger.

Anyhow, I think this is a nice way to compare players across spans of whole years. For example:

• Look how dominant Novak was last year - not just three Slam wins, but seven titles out of 12 tournaments played. So far this year he hasn't made it past the SF of the five tournaments he's played. He's also got a whopping 6700 points to defend the rest of the year, so chances are he's going to slip quite a bit in the rankings.
• As for Alcaraz-Sinner, Alcaraz was better early last year through Wimbledon, then Sinner after Wimbledon until Roland Garros, now it looks like they're going to be playing leap-frog.
• You can also see how the top of the list is more colorful and with more green titles and purple finals, and the further down gets more dominated by blue. Every player in the top 7 has won a big title in either 2023 or '24, and then only #11 Tsitsipas below that.
• You can also see little things like how Zverev's struggles continued through much of clay season last year, than he reached the SF of Roland Garros and has been back to his usual self since. Or how Rune was stronger last year during clay season. Or how different the top 5 is now vs. at the end of 2022.
• It is interesting to note that Novak is the only player in the top 20 to reach more than two Slam finals of the last six - he reached all 4 last year, while Alcaraz and Medvedev reached two, and Sinner, Ruud, Zverev, and Tsitsipas one each.

A note on age distribution: Novak is the only player born in the 1980s in the top 20 (1987), and Dimitrov (1991) is the only other player born before 1995. Nicolas Jarry is the third oldest (1995), Danill Medvedev fourth oldest (1996), nd then everyone else--16 out of 20 players--were born 1997 or later, with five born in the 2000s. This is how the birth year's look laid out:

87, 91, 95, 96, 97, 97, 97, 97, 97, 98, 98, 98, 99, 00, 00, 01, 01, 02, 03, 03​

The median and average birth year is 1998, or players age 25-26, which isn't unusual for historic norms.