Pro Racquetball Stats published this article on Facebook on January 8, 2018.
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LA Open Wrap-up
Congrats to Daniel De La Rosa, who wins his 3rd career IRT pro title with a walkover win over Kane Waselenchuk in the final. Kane landed awkwardly in a rally during his semis win over Mario Mercado, his knee swelled up on him and he couldn’t go in the final. In the other semi, DLR eased past Rocky, who is playing just a few weeks after knee surgery.
Outright walkover forfeits in pro tour finals are pretty rare; we had one in Nov 2017 when Rocky Carson forfeited a final to Kane, but past that you’d have to go all the way back to march 1985 to find a walkover pro final win. I sensed that there has been some concerns about the number of forfeits on tour lately but generally speaking these are not frequently occurring events. Perhaps what we’re seeing is a side-effect of the tour’s top players all being in their late 30s and not being able to play through injuries that they could have 10 years earlier.
Mercado’s semi is his third career semi final; he himself got a walkover win in the quarters from Alvaro Beltran (who apparently injured his back).
Beltran’s withdrawal forced the withdrawal of the #1 seeded Doubles team, which opened the door for the #5 seeded team of Alex Landa and Samuel Murray to make a run to the final. There they ran into #2 seeded Jake Bredenbeck and Jose Diaz, and they had an absolutely fantastic match. Landa/Murray prevailed 14,(14),9, one point short of the “perfect match.” Murray and Bredenbeck both played the left hand side and matched up power for power, while Landa worked the right hand side like a surgeon and Diaz dove all over the court. Once again, we saw the power of the doubles game played at a high level.
Both the singles and doubles data is now uploaded to the site and available for querying.
I’ve updated the www.proracquetballstats.com report page to account for the new era of IRT pro scoring; there’s now queries to show longest matches, most points scored in a win and in a loss for the 15/15/11 scoring method. I’ve also put in some other cool reports lately but I’ll do a separate announcement for that. Until next time!
Todd Boss