Merry Xmas and Happy Holidays to all racquetball fans!
So, when i’m writing previews or doing commentary, i’m often asking myself, “what is this player’s career best win?” To do that, I’ve generally fired up a player’s comprehensive match history and then tried to eyeball who i thought was their best win. But that’s difficult to do accurately and subject to some opinion, so i’ve often wanted some way to create a report that attempts to do just this.
I’ve just created a new way to try to answer the question: a new report called “Best Career Win.” This report sorts all wins in the database for the player by the vanquished player’s seeding, from highest seed to lowest. The report isn’t perfect (it doesn’t really work for players like Kane Waselenchuk or Paola Longoria , who have spent huge portions of their career at #1 and for whom the question of “best career win” doesn’t really apply), and since it is based on seeding data doesn’t really work for older players, but it does work pretty well for lower ranked players and especially non-regular tour players.
An interesting side-effect of the report answers a fun trivia question: how many times has PlayerX defeated a #1 seed in a tournament?
Reminder: seeding data is only accurate from 2009 forward, so this is also a query that generally only works for the modern player.
To find the query, go to www.proracquetballstats.com, select the tour, pick your player from the pulldowns, then select the button next to “Career Best Win” from the report options.
Here’s a couple of players that i’ve used as examples during testing:
– Daniel De La Rosa: http://rball.pro/E53B2E . Six times he’s defeated the #1 seeded player (every time it was @Rocky Carson).
– @Carla Munoz: http://rball.pro/9282AC . Did you know Carla defeated @Rhonda Rajsich when Rhonda was ranked #1 on tour?
Enjoy!