How Do Players Transition From Clay Season to Grass Season? | Q&Andy

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**Andy Roddick** (1:06)
All right, welcome to Q&Andy. I don't know much. I'm sure it's something to do with the grass court season, Mike. What do we got?

**Mike** (1:14)
It is grass court season heavy, and thank you everybody who sent in questions over on DMs. Reminder, please send us your questions. Videos would be great. No one wants to send us a freaking video.

**Andy Roddick** (1:22)
Why don't they want to send videos?

**Mike** (1:23)
I don't know, askandyatservedpodcast.com is the place to send it. I don't know, I don't know.

**Andy Roddick** (1:28)
Send us a video. Think of it as like a Jumbotron during a playoff game. Like just you're on the Jumbotron, let's do some shit.

**Mike** (1:34)
Come on. Alexander, who again could have sent this in as a video, said, since tennis surfaces have gradually become more similar with grass and hard courts, often slowed down to create longer, more entertaining rallies, do you think the ATP and tour overall could still embrace meaningful surface innovation in the future or is the sport steadily moving towards more uniform playing experiences across all surfaces?

**Andy Roddick** (1:57)
I don't know if it's moving towards it, it's there.

**Mike** (2:00)
Got it.

**Andy Roddick** (2:00)
Right, like I don't know how much more uniform it can become. People talk about the surfaces, the ball really matters, right? And I don't know what the checks and balances are. Like you have, you know, like a green in golf, they have like a stent meter to measure it. Tennis, at least for Davis Cup for a while, they had a way to measure how fast the course was and they could, you know, you couldn't be below it and you couldn't be above it. Now I don't know what the quality controls are with the ball, if they fluff up, it matters a lot less how fast the court is, right? So the adjustments are probably more to the ball, being able to kind of effectuate, affect the speed.
And when you have seven different ball suppliers throughout the year that are accepted on tour, it's going to be a bit of a crapshoot. I know from talking to racket Ron from Wilson, COVID really messed up quality controls. And they basically with supply chain, the materials they were able to get weren't as good.

**Mike** (3:06)
And you mean in global, all tennis ball manufacturers?

**Andy Roddick** (3:10)
The way that he said it, and I hope I'm understanding it and repeating it correctly, at least the gist of it is, quality control went to shit during COVID with global supply chain.
The margins were better when you didn't correct that quality control for a lot of the ball suppliers, so therefore they didn't. So I think we're seeing maybe the quality of the ball has been terrible, which normally leads to it fluffing up, being less firm, being a little wonkier with the seams and everything else. So I would point your fire and your questions at the balls more so than the surfaces. Obviously they both have an effect, but I think the balls are the main shitty factor.

**Mike** (3:56)
Can I give a tack on this? Just thinking about, you guys talk a lot about string technology changing a lot.
And also I think now players can, as you've told me, can add more RPMs and can swing harder more often. Do you think that is also a factor of the ball's abuse? Like, I mean, there's just so much more torque and so much more violence on the ball.

**Andy Roddick** (4:15)
But think about this, if you have a ball that has shittier quality and people are taking bigger swings and the impact is, so like with wood rackets, it used to be like straight on, right? You'd play flat through, so you weren't creating this cutting mechanism every time you were hitting, right? You weren't creating that cut. So now you're doing that on every shot. The ball's going to fluff up a lot more. So it exposes quality. You can't lie to these new strings and not have the ball fluff up.