"Having the serve in singles is
a big advantage"
That is a generality that is mostly true but in some cases clearly
FALSE.
Suppose you wanted to investigate the receiver advantage in doubles
and you randomly chose to track Arregui when receiving from Beitia,
Angel and Arrieta.
Would you say, "The RECEIVER advantage in doubles is HUGE
- about 65%!!"? Of course not because the advantage is a
potential only, and not an across-the-board constant for every
player.
Compare the situation to tennis. Big servers at Wimbledon like
6' 1" Pete Sampras or 6' 4" Goran Ivanesivic used to
win almost ALL of their service games. But if you were trying
to handicap the serve percentages for 5' 2" Amanda Coetzer,
5' 5" Tracey Austin, or 5' 6" Cris Evert, you would
be making a massive blunder to expect the same figures from them.
The shorter and less powerful women often did better when not
serving.
For Pete Sampras at Wimbledon, it was 'serve and volley'.
For the elite singles players in jai-alai, it's more like 'serve
and take control'. The singles serve advantage consists of
those 2 parts. Problem is, the lowest echelon backcourt players
in game 1 singles do not have great serves and they do not have
the skill set for the 'take control' part either. At
Dania, Elgezabal, Elizalde, Garita, Minte, Ibon, and Larrea generally
win more points receiving than serving. I can't say anything authoritative
about Miami because I haven't been able to watch closely for a
few years. But when I did watch, it was the same pattern.
In addition to the lack of 'STC' skills, there is another
important factor. Because the earliest singles game is effectively
'backcourt follies', many of the serves are tentative
and SHORT. So Larrea, for example, on his right side, can often
step up and cream the ball for an immediate pass and maybe chula
/ chic chac / tough rebote / weak return - if any. Advantage receiver.
Finally, let's go back to tennis and think about the second serve.
Because of the loss of point penalty for a double fault, the server
has to be careful and take something off of his serve. That alone
can flip the serve from big advantage to big disadavantage. In
fact, I just saw some stats from a Djokovic-Nadal match in Rome
when Djokovic won 47% of his 2nd serve points, but Nadal only
won 25%. IOW, Nadal got slaughtered on his second serve and lost
the match. So if we compare the difference of mens 1st and 2nd
serves in tennis - in terms of being CAREFUL - to the difference
in jai-alai between elite late game front court serves vs early
game backcourt serves, it is not that tough to believe that serving
can be disadvantageous.
At any rate, besides the reasoning, I have the observations and
statistics to back this up. But anyone who had the patience to
watch and track the foot position of the receivers for game 1
/ 4/ 7 / 10 / 13 would reach the same conclusion.
